A French serial killer known by the nickname ‘The Serpent’ has been released from a prison in Nepal, found guilty of several crimes committed against Western tourists in Asia in the 1970s.
Charles Sobhraj, 78, was released after the Supreme Court of Nepal ruled that this was due to the success of his legal team in applying for a reduced sentence due to his age and good behavior.
Sobhraj had spent 19 years in prison in Nepal for killing two tourists, one American and the other Canadian, in 1975.
Who is Carlo Sobrage?
Charles Gormukh Subraj was born on April 6, 1944 in Saigon, Vietnam, at a time when the Japanese military had wrested control of the country from the French. His Vietnamese mother was an unmarried saleswoman and his father, an Indian trader from Mumbai, denied paternity and abandoned the family shortly after Subraj’s birth.
Sobraj adopted his mother’s new friend, a French Army lieutenant stationed in Saigon, and later married her, and the family moved to Marseille, France, where he obtained citizenship.
His childhood was unstable, as the family was constantly moving between France and Indochina and he never felt comfortable anywhere.
Since his childhood, problems began to appear in his personality, especially the lack of discipline. From his teens, he turned to petty crime, which quickly spiraled out of control.
His father’s refusal to acknowledge him aroused great resentment and bitterness in little Subraj, who wrote in his diary: “You will regret not fulfilling your duties as a father.”
serial killer
He was nicknamed “The Snake” for his talent for disguising himself and his ability to escape from prison, and “The Bikini Killer” for his connection to two murders involving two young women who wore bikinis.
Since 1963 Subraj has been in and out of jail for committing a variety of crimes including armed robbery and car theft. He has served in the military in France, India and Afghanistan.
He then turned to murder, his style still the same: he took advantage of the new global drug culture to befriend young French or English-speaking tourists and then kill them.
Sobhraj has been linked to a series of murders of tourists in the 1970s in India, Thailand, Nepal, Turkey and Iran.
Between 1972 and 1982 he was involved in more than 20 homicides in which the victims were drugged and then strangled, beaten or burned. Most of his victims were young Westerners wandering around India and Thailand.
His life was the focus of the events of the series “The Snake”, produced by BBC and Netflix in 2020.
His first major fall came in July 1976 after he attempted to drug a group of French tourists in New Delhi. When the narcotic pills hit some faster than others, three of his victims had enough time to attack him and alert the authorities.
He was sentenced to 12 years in prison and lived a luxurious life in his prison by bribing many guards.
His capacity for violence is said to be matched only by his ability to break out of prison.
In 1971, he escaped from prison in India by feigning appendicitis and escaping from the hospital.
Ma was arrested in 1976 after attempting to drug French tourists, but 10 years later he staged a more daring escape, this time throwing his own birthday party to which both guards and prisoners were invited.
Grapes and biscuits that were secretly served to guests were injected with sleeping pills, infecting everyone except Sobraj and 4 others who ran away with him.
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Indian newspapers reported that they were so arrogant about their escape that they filmed themselves walking through the prison gates on the streets of Delhi.
During the escape he behaved more like a student on vacation than like a desperate prisoner willing to do anything to escape justice, drinking openly in the taverns, and in one of them, offering an Italian pistol to anyone who drank beer in that tavern.
He later said that he didn’t want to escape, but he wanted to avoid extradition to Thailand, where he faces the death penalty for 5 murders committed there, so he managed to escape this way so that the sentence against him would be extended and would be remained in his prison in India.
His plan was successful, and when he was arrested, his sentence was extended for a period of 10 years, ensuring that the death penalty in Thailand is time-barred, which expires after 20 years.
He was released in 1997 and returned to France, where he lived a comfortable life. In 2003 he moved to Nepal, and was soon arrested on charges of traveling on a false passport and murder. As in other cases against him, he denied the allegations against him.
But police said they had a “full bag” of evidence against him. He was sentenced to life in prison the following year for killing Canadian Laurent Carrier and American Connie Jo Brunsich in 1975.
After the verdict was announced, Subraj told reporters in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu that he would appeal the verdict. His appeal was rejected.
In 2004, his biographer, Australian writer Richard Neville, said Sobhraj had confessed to him on a string of murders. Subraj later denied this.
He has a daughter, Usha Subraj, who was born in the early 1970s in Mumbai, India. In 1973, her father fled with her and her mother, Chantal Compagnon, to Afghanistan, the family was kidnapped at the Afghan-Iranian border and imprisoned in Kabul, while Usha was sent to her maternal grandparents in France .
In Kabul he drugged his guards and fled to Paris, where he drugged his mother-in-law and kidnapped his baby girl, but was soon imprisoned again to be sent back to his maternal grandparents. At that time, her mother, Chantal Compagnon, was released from prison in Kabul, then she returned to France and got a court sentence of custody of her daughter, and they moved to the United States to keep her away from his father.
In 2008, while in prison, he married Nehita Biswas, a Nepalese woman 44 years his junior and daughter of his lawyer.
release it
Subraj was serving two life sentences, each of 20 years, in Nepal’s capital for the murders of an American woman, Connie Jo Brunsich, and a Canadian woman, Laurent Carrier. He was convicted in two separate trials, most recently in 2014 when he was sentenced to 20 years in maximum security prison for the murder of Carrier.
But Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered Subraj’s release on Wednesday after his legal team successfully petitioned for a reduced sentence due to his age and good behavior.
A provision of Nepalese law allows for the release of detainees who have shown good behavior and who have served 75 percent of their time.
Agence France-Presse said the verdict said “keeping him in prison continuously is not in line with the prisoner’s human rights” and regular treatment for heart disease is cited as another factor in his release.