French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, linked to at least twenty murders in Asia in the 1970s, was released from his Nepalese prison on Friday and immediately transferred to France, where he is expected on Saturday morning.
In an interview with an Indian newspaper, he explained that he wanted to devote himself from now on to his daughter and to writing a book about her life.
In France, justice should leave him alone: he is not covered by any arrest warrant and has no sentence to execute.
On the other hand, he could be the subject of discreet surveillance by the police.
His plane was to land this Saturday morning on the tarmac at Roissy airport, near Paris.
The 78-year-old French serial killer Charles Sobhraj boarded the day before in Kathmandu, Nepal, in a Qatar Airways aircraft which stopped in Doha.
His lawyer took him a ticket immediately after his release from prison where he had been locked up since 2003, after his life sentence for the murder of two North American tourists in 1975. The Nepalese Supreme Court decided to release the man who is linked to around 20 murders in Asia in the 1970s and which inspired the Netflix series
The Serpent
.
Born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1944, Sobhraj, who suffered a heart attack in 2017, needs open-heart surgery.
As he served three-quarters of his sentence, the justice of this Himalayan republic estimated that this son of an Indian father and a Vietnamese mother, who owes his French nationality to the remarriage of his mother with a soldier, could be released and expelled to France.
Nicknamed "the killer in the bikini", he has a whole bunch of projects waiting for him in France.
"I wrote a manuscript with a co-author, Jean-Charles Deniau, and the book will be published," he told
The Indian Express shortly after his release.
.
“I'm going to take care of promoting and directing a few documentaries.
I have started a second manuscript which I will complete within six months,” he added.
Sentenced for two murders in Nepal
On the plane taking him back to Europe via Qatar, he assured an AFP journalist that he was "innocent" of all the crimes of which he was accused and that he had been wrongly qualified as a serial killer.
Yet hard to believe.
Sobhraj embarked on a career as a criminal in Thailand in 1975. At the time, he called himself Alain Gautier and posed as a dealer in precious stones.
His strategy was to befriend his victims, often Western backpackers on the trail of hippies, before drugging, robbing and murdering them.
His first kill?
That of a young American whose body was found on a beach in a bikini.
Arrested in India in New Delhi in 1976, he spent 21 years behind bars.
A detention marked by a brief 22-day escape in 1986, after drugging prison guards with pastries stuffed with sleeping pills.
He was eventually recaptured in the Indian state of Goa.
Released in 1997, he retired to Paris for a few years.
Then resurfaced in Nepal in 2003, where he was again arrested.
He was then sentenced for two other murders, that of an American tourist, Connie Jo Bronzich, and her companion, the Canadian Laurent Armand Carrière.
“There is nothing about him with us”
In France, justice should launch it quietly.
"There is nothing on him with us, he is not the subject of an arrest warrant", explains to
20 Minutes
a source close to the file.
“There is no penalty to enforce here, that is why he is expelled and not extradited,” adds another well-informed source.
He could, on the other hand, be subject to administrative surveillance measures, that is to say, be discreetly watched by the police.
Sobhraj hopes to "live many more years", as he told the Indian Express.
“I will devote my life to my daughter, and I will probably occupy myself with my books… writing and business.
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Justice
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Miscellaneous facts
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