charles sobhrajthe serial killer known as “The snake”arrived this Saturday at Parisafter being deported by Nepalwhere he was sentenced to two life sentences and having been released due to health problems after 20 years in prison.
The courts managed to prove that he murdered two tourists, an American and a Canadian. However, Sobhraj, who inspired a series of Netflix in 2021, is suspected of having committed a twenties in the 70sparticularly western tourists.
The French citizen, of an Indian father and a Vietnamese mother, was born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1944. At the age of 78 he suffers health problems that can cure in France, through a heart operation.
Both he and his lawyers claim his innocence and claim that his conviction was made with evidence falsified by the Nepalese police.
Sobhraj left the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport without attending to dozens of journalists waiting for him to leave.
Arrested in India in 1976 for poison the occupants from a bus full of French tourists and imprisoned for two decades for the murder of a French citizen, he regained his freedom in 1997 and took refuge in France until in 2003 he was arrested in Nepal during a trip he made to that country.
Sobhraj began to travel the world in the early 1970s and arrived in the Thai capital, Bangkok.
Posing as a jewelry dealer, he befriended the victims, many of them Western backpackers, whom he drugged, robbed and killed.
“I hated backpackers, I saw them as young and poor drug addicts,” he told AFP the australian journalist julie clarke, who interviewed Sobhraj. “He considered himself a criminal hero,” he added.
With a docile and sophisticated appearance, he would have committed his first murder in 1975 when he killed a young American woman whose body was found on a beach. Also nicknamed “bikini killer”, came to be linked to more than 20 homicides.
The alias of “The snake” came because of his ability to assume other identities to evade justice.
“Evil Killer”
He was arrested in India in 1976 and spent 21 years in jail there, except for a brief stint in 1986 when he escaped and was recaptured in the coastal state of Goa.
Released in 1997, he lived in Paris where he was paid to give interviews, but returned to Nepal in 2003. He was sighted in the tourist district of Kathmandu and detained in a casino.
The following year, a court sentenced him to life in prison for the murder of the American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975.
A decade later he was found guilty of the murder of the couple Bronzicha Canadian.
Behind bars, Sobhraj reiterated his innocence in the two deaths, saying he had never been to Nepal before the trip that led to his arrest.
Nadine Giresa French woman who lived in the same apartment building as Sobhraj in Bangkok, told the AFP that he was a “cultured and courteous” character.
“Not only was he a con man, seducer and thief of tourists, he was also an evil murderer,” he said.
(With information from EFE and AFP)
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