Nepal's highest court on Wednesday (December 21st) ordered the release of Charles Sobhraj, the French serial killer portrayed in the Netflix series "The Serpent", responsible for numerous murders across Asia in the 1970s.
The Supreme Court ruled that Charles Sobhraj, 78, imprisoned in the Himalayan republic since 2003 for the murder of two North American tourists, should be released on health grounds.
"To keep him continuously in prison is not in accordance with the human rights of the prisoner", can we read in the copy of the verdict consulted by AFP.
"If there are no other cases pending against him to keep him in prison, this court orders his release today and (...) the return to his country within fifteen days."
The serial killer is in need of open-heart surgery and his release is in accordance with a Nepalese law allowing the release of bedridden prisoners who have already served three-quarters of their sentence, the court added.
Charles Sobhraj is likely to be released from Kathmandu central prison on Thursday, a prison official told AFP.
He will first have to appear in court for paperwork before he can go out free, the official added.
tourist killer
After a troubled childhood and several spells in prison in France for minor offences, Charles Sobhraj began to travel the world in the early 1970s before settling in the Thai capital, Bangkok.
His modus operandi was to charm and befriend his victims, often spiritually-seeking Western backpackers, before drugging, robbing and murdering them.
His involvement in a first murder dates back to 1975, when the body of a young American was found on a beach in Pattaya.
Described as gentle and sophisticated, he is linked to around twenty murders.
His victims were strangled, beaten, or burned, and he often used the passports of his male victims to travel to his next destination.
Sobhraj's nickname, "the Serpent", comes from his ability to assume other identities to escape justice.
A nickname that has become the title of a successful series produced by the BBC and Netflix, which is inspired by his life and where the Franco-Algerian actor Tahar Rahim embodies the serial killer.
Life sentence
Arrested in India in 1976, after the death by poisoning of a French tourist in a Delhi hotel, Charles Sobhraj was sentenced to 12 years in prison for murder.
He eventually spent 21 years in prison, with a brief break in 1986 when he escaped before being arrested again in the Indian coastal state of Goa.
Released in 1997, he retired to Paris but resurfaced in 2003 in Nepal, where he was spotted in the tourist district of Kathmandu and arrested.
The following year, a court sentenced him to life in prison for having killed the American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. Ten years later, he was also found guilty of the murder of the Canadian companion of Connie Jo Bronzich.
In 2008, Charles Sobhraj married, in prison, Nihita Biswas, the daughter of his Nepalese lawyer, 44 years his junior.
With AFP
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