Charles Sobhraj
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A brief biography
As in 2022
Dec 23, 2022: The Times of India
Notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj was released from a jail in Nepal, following an order from the country's Supreme Court earlier this week. Sobhraj (78) served more than 18 years in prison after being convicted for the murder of two American tourists in 1975. He was released on
Born in 1944 in Vietnam, Sobhraj was the son of an Indian father and Vietnamese mother. He moved to France at a young age and became involved in criminal activity early on, including petty theft and fraud.
In the 1970s, Sobhraj traveled to Southeast Asia, where he began committing more serious crimes, including murder.
Sobhraj's crimes were characterized by his cunning and ability to manipulate those around him. He picked his victims, using his charm and good looks to lure them into his trap.
Sobhraj targeted tourists, particularly backpackers, in Thailand, Nepal, and India. He would often befriend and then drug them, stealing their possessions and identification.
In some cases, he killed his victims and disposed of their bodies in a gruesome manner, earning him the moniker "Bikini Killer."
Sobhraj was finally caught in 1976 in New Delhi, after a series of murders and theft at the city's Ashoka Hotel. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
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.
Released in 1997, Sobhraj retired to Paris but resurfaced 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.
Sobhraj's story has been the subject of numerous books, documentaries, and movies, including the TV series "The Serpent," which was released in 2021.
Details
Dec 23, 2023: The Times of India
From: Dec 23, 2023: The Times of India
He led global law enforcement on a merry dance, flitting from Paris to Thailand and India, killing at least a dozen women in the process. He was arrested and sent to Delhi’s Tihar jail, but he walked out after throwing a party for the guards and feeding them drugged grapes. The press called him 'bikini killer' and 'the serpent', and he became quite the cult figure back in the 1980s. Now, Charles Sobhraj, the serial killer, will walk out of a Kathmandu jail aged 78.
Incarcerated since 2003 for killing two North American tourists, Sobhraj is being released after nearly 20 years, following a Nepal Supreme Court order on December 21, 2022. The order states a legal provision that prisoners who have completed 75% of their jail term and showed good character during imprisonment can be released. Sobhraj’s failing health on account of a heart disease is another reason why the court ordered his release. In Nepal, a life sentence is for 20 years, of which Sobhraj has served 19 years.
Sobhraj’s early years
The con artist-turned-serial killer was born in April 1944 in French-administered Saigon, Vietnam, to an Indian father and Vietnamese mother. According to reports, his parents never married, and his father – a merchant – did not acknowledge paternity.
Sobhraj moved to France at a young age after his mother married a French soldier. The early years left their mark on Sobhraj, who resented his father abandoning him; he also had issues with his mother’s new family. “ I will make you regret that you have missed your father's duty," he wrote in his diary, the BBC reported some years ago.
It was a prediction that came terrifyingly true.
His life of crime started early, with petty theft and fraud. He was first arrested in Paris in 1963 for burglary – from there on his crimes became more sinister, leading up to not one but multiple murders.
The ‘bikini killer’
In the 1970s, Sobhraj was connected with a string of murders across Asia. A French citizen, he began travelling the world in the early 1970s and wound up in Thailand’s capital Bangkok.
Posing as a gem trader, he would befriend his victims, many of them Western backpackers on the 1970s hippie trail, before drugging their food or drink, stealing their passports, and then robbing and murdering them. "He despised backpackers, he saw them as poor young drug addicts," Australian journalist Julie Clarke, who interviewed Sobhraj, told news agency AFP in 2021. "He considered himself a criminal hero.”
Sophisticated and handsome, he was implicated in his first murder in Thailand, that of a young American woman whose body was found on a beach wearing a bikini, in 1975. Nicknamed the ‘bikini killer’, he was eventually linked to more than 20 murders of young women, some of them in bikinis, – not just in Thailand, but also Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, Nepal, Iran, Hong Kong and India, as well as countries in Europe.
Sobhraj eventually admitted to at least 12 killings between 1972 and 1976, and hinted at others to interviewers before retracting the confessions ahead of further court cases, according to his biographers. His true number of victims is unknown.
Nadine Gires, a Frenchwoman who lived in the same Bangkok apartment block as Sobhraj, remembered him as "cultured, courteous". But he was far more. "He was not only a swindler, a seducer, a robber of tourists, but an evil murderer," she said in an interview to AFP last year. Others described him as a psychopath with a manipulative personality.
Law enforcement authorities and journalists who interacted with him said Sobhraj came across as suave and charming – qualities that may have helped him escape from prisons in different countries and evade punishment. When he could not escape, he bribed jail officials to treat him preferentially – India was one such country where he lived a very comfortable life in prison.
And this is where Sobhraj's other sobriquet, ‘the serpent’ comes from – his ability to assume other identities to evade justice. It even became the title of a hit series made by the BBC and Netflix that was based on his life, which was released in 2021. Besides that, these are at least four books and three documentaries portraying his life story.
The Indian connection
In the early-1970s, Sobhraj was caught following a failed robbery attempt at Hotel Ashoka in New Delhi, but he managed to escape from hospital after faking an appendix issue. In the mid-1970s, Thailand issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of drugging and killing six women, some of whom turned up dead on a beach near the resort of Pattaya. He was, however, jailed in India before he could stand trial on these charges in Thailand.
In 1976, he was arrested in New Delhi for poisoning a group of French student-tourists. Before that, he had poisoned a French national who died and murdered an Israeli national in India. He was eventually sentenced to 12 years in prison, but managed to briefly escape in 1986 following an audacious plan – throwing a birthday party in which guards and prisoners in Delhi’s Tihar jail, where he was incarcerated, were invited. The BBC reported that grapes and biscuits handed to the guests were secretly injected with sleeping pills, knocking out everyone except Sobhraj and four other escapees.
He was soon captured again in Goa. But that appears to be what he wanted all along – he deliberately escaped towards the end of his jail term in India in order to be re-captured and face new charges for his escape. That way he could avoid extradition to Thailand where he was wanted for five murders and would almost certainly be given the death penalty.
By the time of his release in 1997, the 20 year timeframe for him to be tried in Bangkok had lapsed. He was deported to France without charge, where he lived in Paris, giving paid interviews to journalists, and minted large sums of money. But then he went back to Nepal in 2003.
Life sentence in Nepal
In September 2003, he was spotted in Kathmandu's tourist district and arrested in a casino at a five-star hotel after he travelled to the country from Hong Kong on a fake passport. Nepal was one of the countries where he could still be arrested for past crimes.
A court in the Nepalese capital handed him a life sentence the following year for killing American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. Her body had been found in a wheat field on the outskirts of Kathmandu. At the time, Sobhraj denied killing the US woman and his lawyers said the charge against him was based on assumption, but the court thought otherwise.
A decade later he was also found guilty of killing Bronzich's Canadian companion Laurent Carriere.
Ladies' man
In 2010, Sobhraj is believed to have married his Indian-Nepali interpreter, Nihita Biswas, the daughter of one of his lawyers, while in prison – the news wasn’t confirmed. Biswas was 20 years old and Sobhraj 64 when they got engaged in 2008. The TOI reported that Sobhraj called it “love at first sight” with Biswas. Biswas went on to star in the fifth season of Indian reality show Bigg Boss. In 2017-18, she reportedly donated blood before Sobrraj underwent heart surgery.
Before that, Sobhraj was married to Chantal Compagnon, a chic Parisienne around 1970. He has a daughter from that marriage – Usha – who was born in Mumbai. She is now living in the US, reports say. Sobhraj and Chantal divorced later.
While in India, he met Marie-Andrée Leclerc from Quebec, Canada, a tourist looking for adventure. Blindsided by Sobhraj, Leclerc became his most devoted follower and was his accomplice in some of the crimes.
Sobhraj also reportedly had many other romantic relationships. Even while in prison in India, women would, according to reports, routinely come to meet him, some of them for visits of a sexual nature. A report in South China Morning Post quotes a former Tihar jail official, Sunil Gupta, who says, "“He used the guest house of one of the top jail officials to meet his girlfriends,” adding that Sobhraj would shed his kurta-pyjama in favour of a suit worn with a matching scarf whenever he had a woman visitor.
What next Sobhraj’s order for release on December 21 comes nearly a year after Nepal’s top court issued a show cause notice to its government asking why Sobhraj should not be released.
Sobhraj had earlier filed a petition in court for an exemption on his life term on grounds of old age and failing health.
