Nepal: French serial killer Charles Sobhraj released from prison, he should soon be expelled

French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who committed several murders across Asia in the 1970s and inspired the Netflix series 'The Serpent', was released from prison in Nepal on Friday.

The Supreme Court ruled that Charles Sobhraj, 78, imprisoned in the Himalayan republic since 2003 for the murder of two North American tourists, should be released on health grounds.

Prison officials told AFP that after receiving the court documents, they would hand Sobhraj over to immigration authorities.

The court ordered that he be expelled within 15 days.

Deported to France?

The French Foreign Ministry has not yet officially received, from the Nepalese authorities, the request for the expulsion of the French serial killer Charles Sobhraj but France will welcome it if necessary, said Thursday a spokeswoman. at AFP.

"We have been informed that the Supreme Court of Nepal has accepted the appeal of Mr. Charles Sobhraj requesting his release in view of his age and his state of health, and his deportation to France", she explained. .

“If a request for expulsion is notified to them, France would be required to grant it since Mr. Sobhraj is a French national,” she added without further details.

open heart surgery

The serial killer is in need of open-heart surgery and his release is in line with a Nepalese law allowing the release of bedridden prisoners who have already served three-quarters of their sentence, the court heard.

A French citizen of Vietnamese and Indian descent, Sobhraj began traveling the world in the early 1970s and found himself in the Thai capital, Bangkok.

Posing as a dealer in precious stones, he befriended his victims, often Western backpackers on the trail of 1970s hippies, before drugging, robbing and murdering them.

Nicknamed “the bikini killer”, or even “the Serpent”

He is implicated in his first murder, that of a young American whose body was found on a beach in a bikini in 1975.

Nicknamed the "bikini killer", he was eventually linked to more than 20 murders.

Sobhraj's other nickname, "The Serpent", comes from his ability to assume other identities to escape justice.

He was arrested in India in 1976 and eventually spent 21 years in prison, with a brief interlude in 1986 when he escaped before being arrested again in the Indian coastal state of Goa.

Released in 1997, he retired to Paris but resurfaced in 2003 in Nepal, where he was spotted in the tourist district of Kathmandu and arrested.

The following year, a court sentenced him to life in prison for killing American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. Ten years later, he was also convicted of murdering Ms Bronzich's Canadian girlfriend.

In prison in 2008, Sobhraj married Nihita Biswas, 44 years his junior and daughter of his Nepalese lawyer.