KATHMANDU (Reuters) – Frenchman Charles Sobhraj, convicted of murder and considered a serial killer in 1970s Asia, was on his way to France on Friday after being released from prison in Nepal where he spent nearly 20 years in detention.
Charles Sobhraj left Nepal on a scheduled flight to Doha, Qatar and then Paris, said Katak Rawal, an airport official in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu.
The former detainee has been banned from entering Nepal for ten years, said an official from the Immigration Department.
Nicknamed Thailand’s ‘bikini killer’ and ‘the Serpent’, 78-year-old Charles Sobhraj is suspected of killing more than twenty young Western backpackers in several Asian countries, most of them by poisoning their food or their drink.
His story inspired a series co-produced by the BBC and Netflix, called “The Serpent”.
Nepal’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered the release of Charles Sobhraj citing his age after serving 19 of the 20 years in prison he was last sentenced to.
HIGH SECURITY
After his release, Charles Sobhraj told AFP that he felt “good”. “I have a lot to do. I have to sue a lot of people. Including the state of Nepal,” he said.
Charles Sobhraj had been held in a high-security prison in Kathmandu since 2003, when he was arrested for the murder of American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975.
He has always denied the murder and his lawyers have denounced a conviction based on assumptions.
Several years later, Charles Sobhraj was also found guilty of murdering Connie Jo Bronzich’s Canadian companion, Laurent Carrière.
He is also suspected of many other murders, including in Thailand, where police believe he drugged and killed at least six women in the 1970s. He had coated his first victim, the young American Teresa Ann Knowlton, with a bikini and dumped her body on a beach to pretend she had accidentally drowned.
Born in Saigon, at the time in French Indochina, to a Vietnamese mother and an Indian father, Charles Sobhraj was married at the time of his crimes to the Canadian Marie-Andrée Leclerc, who died in 1984. He married in 2008 the daughter of his Nepalese lawyer, Nihita Biswas, 44 years his junior.
(Report Gopal Sharma in Kathmandu, written by Shilpa Jamkhandikar, French version Augustin Turpin and Blandine Hénault, edited by Tangi Salaün)