French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who committed several murders in Asia in the 1970s and inspired the Netflix series The snake, was due to be released from prison on Thursday, in Nepal. Marie-Andrée Leclerc, a medical secretary from Lévis, was his accomplice.
The Supreme Court ruled that Charles Sobhraj, 78, imprisoned in this Himalayan republic since 2003 for the murder of two North American tourists, should be released for health reasons.
Prison officials told AFP that after receiving the court documents, they would hand him over to immigration. The court ordered that he be deported within 15 days.
The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs has for its part made it known that it had not yet officially received, from the Nepalese authorities, the request for the expulsion of Charles Sobhraj, but that France would welcome it if necessary.
If such a request were “notified” to it, “France would be required to grant it since Mr. Sobhraj is a French national”, explained a spokesperson for this ministry.
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, according to the court.
” The snake ”
A French citizen of Vietnamese and Indian descent, Charles Sobhraj began traveling the world in the early 1970s and found himself in the Thai capital, Bangkok.
Posing as a dealer in gems, he befriended his victims, often Western backpackers on the trail of 1970s hippies, before drugging, robbing and murdering them.
“He despised backpackers, poor young drug addicts. He saw himself as a criminal hero,” Australian journalist Julie Clarke, who interviewed him, told AFP in 2021.
In 1975, he met Marie-Andrée Leclerc, a Quebecer originally from Lévis on a tourist trip to India.
PHOTO ARCHIVES ASSOCIATED PRESS
Marie-Andrée Leclerc, following her acquittal in New Delhi in July 1978
The same year, the couple met a young American whose body was found on a beach in a bikini. This is Sobhraj’s first known murder.
Nicknamed the “bikini killer”, this suave and sophisticated man was eventually linked to more than 20 murders. His other nickname, “The Serpent”, comes from his ability to assume other identities to escape justice.
It became the title of a hit series made by the BBC and Netflix which is inspired by his life.
“Crogue, seducer, thief”
He was arrested in 1976 in India and eventually spent 21 years in prison, with a brief interlude 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 the 1975 murder of American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich. Ten years later, he was also convicted of murdering Ms.me Bronzich.
To date, Marie-Andrée Leclerc’s involvement in the crimes remains unclear. The Quebecer was accused of complicity in two murders that occurred in India, those of Jean-Luc Salomon – for which she was acquitted – and Avoni Jacob.
In 1980, she and Sobhraj were convicted of the second murder. Marie-Andrée Leclerc appealed the judgment, but died shortly afterwards of ovarian cancer.
Behind bars, Charles Sobhraj maintained he was innocent of both murders and claimed he had never been to Nepal before the trip that led to his arrest.
“I really didn’t, and I think I’m going to get out,” he told AFP in 2007 in an interview at Kathmandu central prison.
Nadine Gires, a Frenchwoman who lived in the same building as Charles Sobhraj in Bangkok, told AFP last year that she initially found him to be a “cultured” and impressive character.
But in the end, “he was not just a trickster, a seducer, a thief of tourists, but a diabolical murderer”.
Thai police officer Sompol Suthimai, whose work with Interpol helped arrest Charles Sobhraj in 1976, had pushed for him to be extradited to Thailand and tried for the murders he committed there .
But on Thursday, he told AFP he had no objection to his release because he and the criminal he once prosecuted were now too old.
“It’s been so long,” said Sompol Suthimai, now 90. “I think he has already paid for his actions. »