(Paris) The French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, 78, known as “The Serpent”, expelled by the authorities of Nepal after having spent nearly twenty years there in prison for the murder of two North American tourists, returned on Saturday morning in France.
Suspected of twenty murders in the 1970s in Asia, the one who inspired a series broadcast on Netflix (The snake) arrived at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport in Paris on a plane from Doha (Qatar) and was immediately taken care of by the police, noted an AFP journalist who was traveling with him.
After “identity checks”, Charles Sobhraj quietly left the airport, we learned from an airport source, failing the many journalists who were waiting for him.
On the plane that took him to Doha, where he arrived in transit on Friday evening, the septuagenarian assured the AFP journalist that he was “innocent” of the crimes with which he is accused.
“I’m innocent in all these cases, okay? […] Everything was built on false documents, ”he said in this exclusive interview with AFP. ” I have a lot of things to do. I have to sue many people including the State of Nepal”.
“The judge, without questioning any witness […] and without allowing the accused to present any argument, wrote the verdict,” he added. “The Courts of Nepal, […] all the judges were biased”.
“It will have taken more than nineteen years for him to regain his freedom and I am very happy and very shocked”, commented to the press his French lawyer, Ms.e Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who picked him up at the airport. “He was unjustly sentenced on a file fabricated with documents falsified by the Nepalese police. It’s a scandal, he is presented as a serial killer, which is completely false.
“He despised backpackers”
Nepal’s Supreme Court, which ruled on his release on Wednesday, said Charles Sobhraj needed open-heart surgery and the decision was in line with a Nepalese law allowing the release of bedridden prisoners who have already served three-quarters of their pain.
She ordered that he be deported within 15 days to France.
Framed by police wearing bulletproof vests, Charles Sobhraj, wearing a medical mask, had made no comment to the crowd of journalists who awaited him on his release from prison.
Before the announcement of his transfer, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs had for its part made it known that France would welcome him if an extradition request was “notified” to him.
A French citizen with a Vietnamese mother and an Indian father, Charles Sobhraj began traveling the world in the early 1970s and found himself in the Thai capital, Bangkok.
Posing as a dealer in gemstones, 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.
Dubbed the “bikini killer” in 1975 after the body of an American woman clad in a single bikini was found on a beach in Thailand, the man has been linked to more than 20 murders.
“A diabolical murderer”
Charles Sobhraj’s 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.
Arrested in India in 1976, he spent 21 years in prison, a period marked by a brief escape in 1986 after drugging the guards. He was eventually arrested in the Indian state of Goa.
Released in 1997, he retired to Paris but resurfaced in 2003 in Nepal, where he was spotted in 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.
Nadine Gires, a Frenchwoman who lived in the same building as Charles Sobhraj in Bangkok, told AFP last year that she initially found him “cultured” and impressive.
But in the end, “he was not just a trickster, a seducer, a thief of tourists, but a diabolical murderer”.