Serial killer Charles Sobhraj, nicknamed “The Serpent”, will be freed by Nepalese justice for health reasons. He should be repatriated to France.
His story had recently stirred the web following the broadcast on Netflix of the life of Charles Sobhraj, French serial killer, through the series “The Serpent”, also his nickname. A reptilian comparison because the man is reputed to have been able to charm his victims and then to have escaped prison several times by trickery. This time, no escape but a release because the Supreme Court of Nepal ruled that the 78-year-old prisoner imprisoned in the Himalayan republic should be released for medical reasons. “To keep him continuously in prison does not comply with the human rights of the prisoner”, is it written on the document ordering his release.
The man detained in the central Nepalese prison in Kathmandu should be released in the coming days before being repatriated to France, his country of nationality. He had been locked up in Nepal for years because convicted of several murders in Asia, he is also accused of many other murders for which his guilt has not been proven. Besides the many murders attributed to him, he is a trickster and poison expert. He began his misdeeds by commenting on petty thefts before being related to organized crime by making his specialty the theft of tourists in Asia whom he drugged beforehand.
The story of the “Snake”
“Le Serpent” partly grew up in France. Born to a Vietnamese mother and an Indian father, Charles Sobhraj’s parents divorced when he was 3 years old, first stayed with his father in Vietnam, the child obtained French nationality when his mother s married to a French soldier who adopted the young Charles in Marseilles. He will commit several thefts and offenses in France which will send him to prison.
In 1970, accompanied by his wife at the time, Chantal Compagnon, they headed for India where Charles Sobhraj mainly targeted tourists to rob them. Hunted by the authorities in India, he left the country there before returning in 1974 to establish a new network. It was the following year that many murders were attributed to him, the bikini murders. The first murder attributed to him is that of Teresa Ann Knowlton, a young American tourist whom he drugged then dressed in a bikini before strangling her. There follows a long series of murders, about twenty are attributed to him.
Arrested in Kathmandu in 2004, the Nepalese capital, the highest local court sentenced him for the first time to a life sentence for the murder of the American Connie Joe Bronzich in Nepal in 1975. Ten years later, the Supreme Court country sentenced him a second time to life in prison for the murder of Laurent Carrière, a Canadian traveller.