New Delhi: French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who was released from a Nepal jail on Friday, told the news agency AFP n board a plane for his deportation to France, “I feel great… I have a lot to do. I have to sue a lot of people. Including the state of Nepal.”
Charles, who is responsible for multiple murders in the 1970s across Asia, said he felt “great” on being released after almost 20 years.
Asked if he thought he had been wrongly described as a serial killer, the 78-year-old said: “Yes, yes.”
Nepal’s top court ruled on Wednesday that he should be freed on health grounds and deported to France within 15 days.
On Friday, he was released and put on a flight at Kathmandu airport to take him via Doha to Paris, where he was due to land early on Saturday, the report added.
The life and times of Charles Sobhraj:
- Born in Saigon to an Indian father and a Vietnamese mother who later married a Frenchman, Sobhraj embarked on an international life of crime and ended up in Thailand in 1975.
- Posing as a gem trader, he would befriend his victims, many of them Western backpackers on the 1970s hippie trail, before drugging, robbing and murdering them.
- He was implicated in the murder 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.
- He was arrested in India in 1976 and ultimately spent 21 years in jail.
The great escape
- In 1986, he drugged prison guards and escaped but was recaptured in Goa.
- He was then released in 1997, and started living in Paris, giving paid interviews to journalists.
- Then he went back to Nepal in 2003.
- He was spotted in a casino playing baccarat by journalist Joseph Nathan, one of the founders of the Himalayan Times newspaper, and arrested.
- A court in Nepal handed Sobhraj 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.
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