'The snake', the story of a serial killer

“Belief in some kind of supernatural evil is not necessary.

Men by themselves are capable of any evil ”.

Joseph Conrad.

And if there is any doubt about Conrad's claim, just watch

, the remarkable BBC series based on true events that Netflix shows.

Eight chapters on Charles Sobhraj, a serial killer under the nickname of Alain Gautier, who is believed to have been responsible for between 12 and 24 murders in the 1970s, all of which were committed on young Westerners traveling to the mythical Southeast Asian.

Bankok, Carachi, Kashmir, Dal Lake, New Delhi, Kathmandu, Paris ..., a luxury of locations where Sobhraj and his accomplices, Marle ‐ Andrée Leclerc, and Ajay Chowdhury usually operated.

They drugged, killed, and stole backpackers' money and passports.

The other great protagonist of the story is Herman Knippenberg, a discreet diplomat from the Dutch Embassy in Bankok who became an amateur detective obsessed with discovering the murderer of a Dutch couple, aware of the laziness shown by the Thai police.

It was the smoke that made it possible to discover the fire until reaching the authors capable of any Conradian evil.

After several incarcerations and escapes, Sobhraj was finally arrested in Kathmandu in 2003 and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of an American and a Canadian.

He is 76 years old and still in prison.

The writers of the series relied on the archives of Herman Knippenberg, who explained that the series "would give the opportunity to extend a warning to travelers that they must be careful, because in paradise there may be a snake lurking somewhere" .

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