The World famous serial killer Charles Sobhraj is all set to get released from Nepal Jail after 19 years.
He was known as “the Bikini Killer” due to the attire of several of his victims, as well as “the Splitting Killer” and “the Serpent”, due to “his snake-like ability to avoid detection by authorities”.
Charles Gurumukh Sobhraj Hotchand Bhawnani (born 6 April 1944) is a French serial killer , Fraudster and thief ,who preyed on Western tourists travelling on the hippie trail of South Asia during the 1970s.
According to latest reports, Nepal’s top court on Wednesday ordered the release of the infamous serial killer , Charles Sobhraj. The French serial killer who was portrayed in the Netflix series “The Serpent” was responsible for a series of murders across Asia in the 1970s.
As per further reports the French Embassy had approached the Nepal government to secure Sobhraj’s release, and he is expected to be freed and deported to his home country France as early as Thursday. Charles Sobhraj is known to be a part-Indian and was born in then-French occupied Saigon region to an Indian businessman and a Vietnamese shop assistant.
Sobhraj later moved to France after his mother married a French soldier. With a disturbed childhood Sobhraj got attached to petty crimes early on and was known to be regularly moved in and out of jail since his teenage years.
Sobhraj got famous as the bikini killer in 1975 after his first victim who was wearing a bikini was found murdered on a beach in Pattaya.
According to reports , Sobhraj had killed more than 20 people, between 1972 and 1982. Before committing the murders he used to drug and strangle the victims or even beat or burn them . Western backers were his hit targets mostly women across the “hippie trail” in India and Thailand.
An exceptionally cunning Sobhraj used to befriend his victims and would later spike their drinks and poison them to death.
He also often misused his male victims’ passports to travel abroad illegally .
Sobhraj was arrested in India in 1976, after a French tourist died from poisoning at a Delhi hotel, and was sentenced to 12 years for murder.
Sobhraj ultimately spent 21 years in jail, with a brief break in 1986 when he escaped and was caught again in the Indian coastal state of Goa.
After being released in 1997, Sobhraj retired to Paris but reappeared in 2003 in Nepal, where he was spotted in Kathmandu’s tourist district and arrested.
A court there handed him a life sentence the following year for killing US tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. A decade later he was also found guilty of killing Bronzich’s Canadian companion.
While he was in Nepal jail in 2008, Sobhraj even married his lawyer’s daughter, Nihita Biswas, who is 44-years younger to him .
The Supreme Court ruled Sobhraj, 78, who has been in prison in the Himalayan republic since 2003 for murdering two North American tourists, should be freed on health grounds.
“Keeping him in the prison continuously is not in line with the prisoner’s human rights,” read a copy of the verdict seen by AFP.
“If there is not any other pending cases against him to keep him in the prison, this court orders his release by today and… the return to his country within 15 days.”
