Serial killer 'The Serpent' to be freed from Nepal jail
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| 78 years Charles Sobhraj who has been in prison in the Himalayan republic since 2003 for murdering two North American tourists, going to be freed on health grounds.— AFP |
Nepal's highest court on Wednesday ordered the release of |
Charles Sobhraj, after spending 19 years in jail for the murder of
two North American tourists in Kathmandu in 1975, has been ordered to be
deported to France within 15 days.
His victims were mostly young Western backpackers in India and
Thailand.
The notorious killer was serving a 20-year double sentence for the
murders of an American woman, Connie Jo Bronzich, and her Canadian backpacker
friend, Laurent Carriere, in Nepal's capital.
Nepal's Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered Sobhraj's release after
his legal team successfully filed a petition claiming that he should be given a
concession on his prison term because of his 78-year-old age and good behavior.
A provision in Nepalese law allows for the release of prisoners
who have shown good character and served 75 percent of their prison terms.
"Continuing to keep him in prison is not in line with a
prisoner's human rights, and cited regular treatment for heart disease as
another factor in his release," the ruling read, according to AFP.
Sobhraj has been linked to more than 20 murders between 1972 and
1982 in Afghanistan, India, Thailand, Turkey, Nepal, Iran and Hong Kong, in
which the victims were drugged, strangled, beaten or burned.
He was known as the "Bikini Killer". Thailand issued a warrant
for his arrest in the mid-1970s for drugging and killing six women, all wearing
bikinis, on a beach in Pattaya.
The sobriquet, "The Serpent", comes from his ability to
assume other identities to evade justice. It became the title of a hit series
based on his life by the BBC and Netflix.
He was arrested in India in 1976 and spent 21 years in jail there;
meanwhile he escaped the jail in 1986 but was soon caught again in the Indian
coastal state of Goa.
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| Tahar Rahim as Charles Sobhraj. The BBC hit series 'The Serpent' was watched by more than 31 million Brits. Image: BBC |
Sobhraj spent two decades in New Delhi's maximum-security Tihar
Jail on suspicion of theft but was extradited to France in 1997.
After his release, he moved to Paris but resurfaced in Nepal in
2003, where he was spotted in a casino in Nepal's capital Kathmandu and
arrested for murdering American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich.
A court there sentenced him to life in prison the following year.
A decade later he was also found guilty of murdering Bronzich's Canadian
colleague.
Sobhraj married Nihita Biswas in prison in
2008, who is 44 years his junior and the daughter of his Nepalese lawyer.
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