Serial killer The Serpent freed from Nepal jail
A famous French serial murderer known as The Serpent, who was jailed in Nepal after being found guilty of killing several tourists in Asia in the 1970s, has been freedfrom Nepal Jail.
The 78-year-old Charles Sobhraj was released after a court found him in his favour due to his age and good behaviour. He was imprisoned in Nepal for 19 years for the 1975 murder of two North Americans.
On the hippie trail in India and Thailand, Sobhraj preyed primarily on young Western travellers, whose narrative was told in the television drama The Serpent.
In Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, the notorious killer was concurrently serving two sentences of 20 years each for the 1975 slayings of an American woman named Connie Jo Bronzich and her Canadian travelling companion, Laurent Carriere.
He had already been sentenced to a maximum security jail in 2014 for the murder of Carriere after being found guilty in two separate trials.
But on Wednesday, the Nepalese Supreme Court mandated Sobhraj’s release after his legal team had successfully petitioned for a reduction in his sentence owing to medical issues.
A provision in Nepalese law also allows inmates who have shown good character and completed 75% of their jail term to be released.
“Keeping him in the prison continuously is not in line with the prisoner’s human rights,” the verdict read, according to AFP, and cites regular treatment for heart disease as another factor in his release. He had heart surgery in 2017.
In more than 20 murders that took place between 1972 and 1982 and involved drugging, strangling, beating, or burning the victims, Sobhraj has been involved.
Because of his propensity for adopting convincing personas, capacity for prison break, and propensity to target young girls, he was known as The Serpent or the Bikini Killer. It later served as the name for a popular BBC and Netflix television series about the murderer that premiered in 2021.
Sobhraj had already served two decades in prison in India for poisoning a busload of French tourists before his two convictions in Kathmandu.
By drugging the jail guards during that period, he momentarily succeeded in escaping from custody. In a later interview, he explained that the escape was a plot to prolong his sentence and prevent his extradition to Thailand, where he was sought for five other killings.
Serial killer The Serpent freed from Nepal jail
He was wanted by Thai officials for allegedly drugging and killing six women, some of whom were discovered dead on a beach close to the Pattaya holiday town.
Sobhraj returned to France after being freed from India in 1997, where he lived in Paris and conducted paid interviews with journalists.
But he returned to Nepal and was arrested for Bronzich’s murder in 2003 after being spotted by a reporter in a casino in Kathmandu.
