Following a judicial decision, a French serial killer depicted in the Netflix drama The Serpent will be released from a Nepalese prison.
Charles Sobhraj, who served 19 years in prison for the 1975 murder of two tourists in Kathmandu, has been given 15 days to get back to France.
Sobhraj served 20 years in prison in India after being implicated in a number of other tourist murders that occurred in the 1970s.
Most of his victims were young Western travellers traveling on the hippy trail in Thailand and India.
Connie Jo Bronzich, an American woman, and Laurent Carriere, a Canadian hiker, were killed, and the legendary perpetrator was serving two life sentences in Nepal’s capital, one for each of their murders, totaling 20 years.
He was found guilty in two separate trials; most recently, in 2014, he was given a 20-year term for killing Carriere.
But on Wednesday, the Nepalese Supreme Court authorized Sobhraj’s release after his legal team had successfully petitioned for a reduction in his sentence due to his 78 years old and good character.
A clause in Nepalese law permits the release of prisoners who have demonstrated excellent moral character and served 75% of their sentence term.
According to news sources, the judgement stated that keeping him in prison continually violated his human rights and listed frequent heart disease medication as another reason for his release. According to his attorney, he might be freed as early as Thursday.
In more than 20 murders that took place between 1972 and 1982 and involved drugging, strangling, beating, or burning the victims, Sobhraj has been implicated.
Because of his propensity for using convincing disguises, ability to break out of jail, and propensity to target young ladies, he was known as “The Serpent” or the “Bikini Killer.” It later served as the name for a popular BBC and Netflix television series about the murderer that premiered in 2020.
Sobhraj had already served two decades in prison in India for poisoning a busload of French tourists before his two convictions in Kathmandu.
]By drugging the jail guards during that period, he momentarily succeeded in escaping from custody. In a later interview, he explained that the escape was a plot to lengthen his sentence and prevent his extradition to
Thailand, where he was sought for five other killings.
Sobhraj was apprehended for Bronzich’s murder after being freed from prison in India in 2003 after being seen in a Kathmandu casino.
