“I have a lot of things to do. I have to sue a lot of people,” Charles Sobhraj, nicknamed “the snake,” told AFP when he arrived in Paris on Saturday.
After 20 years behind bars in Nepal, the French serial killer has found France and wants to clear his name. The one who calls himself “innocent” intends to attack Netflix and the BBC for the series The snakefiction released in 2021 inspired by his life.
Franceinfo, which reveals this project, quotes Charles Sobhraj’s lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre:
“(This series) gives it a completely manipulated reputation, where there is only 30% truth,” he said.
“Everything was built on false documents”
Suspected of around 20 murders in the 1970s in Asia, the 78-year-old has spent the last 20 years in a Nepalese prison for the murder of two American tourists.
Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled on his release on Wednesday saying he needed open-heart surgery and the move was in line with a Nepalese law that allows the release of bedridden prisoners who have already served three-quarters of their sentence. He then ordered that he be deported within 15 days to France.
Charles Sobhraj arrived at Paris’ Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport on a plane from Doha, Qatar, and was immediately attended to by police, an AFP journalist who was traveling with him said. On the plane that took him to Doha, where he arrived in transit on Friday night, the septuagenarian assured the AFP journalist that he is “innocent” of the crimes with which he is accused:
“I’m innocent in all these files, okay? (…) Everything was built on false documents, ”she said.
He also intends to sue the State of Nepal: “The judge, without questioning any witness (…) and without allowing the defendant to present the slightest argument, wrote the verdict,” he added. “The courts in Nepal,… all the judges, were biased.”
fake gem dealer
“It took him more than 19 years to regain his freedom and I am very happy and very shocked,” Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, who came to pick him up at the airport, told reporters. “He was unjustly convicted in a file made with falsified documents by the Nepal police. It’s a scandal, they present him as a serial killer, which is completely false.”
Charles Sobhraj, a French citizen of a Vietnamese mother and an Indian father, began traveling the world in the early 1970s, finding himself in the Thai capital, Bangkok.
Posing as a gem dealer, he befriended his victims, often Western backpackers on the trail of 1970s hippies, before drugging, robbing and murdering them.
“He despised backpackers, poor young drug addicts. He saw himself as a criminal hero,” Australian journalist Julie Clarke, who interviewed him in 2021, told AFP.
Dubbed the “bikini killer” in 1975 after the body of a bikini-clad American woman was found washed up on a beach in Thailand, the man has been linked to more than 20 murders.
Convicted of two murders
Arrested in India in 1976, he spent 21 years in prison, a period marked by a brief escape in 1986 after drugging guards. He was eventually arrested in the Indian state of Goa.
Released in 1997, he retired to Paris but reappeared in 2003 in Nepal, where he was seen in Kathmandu and arrested. The following year, a court sentenced him to life in prison for the 1975 murder of American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich. Ten years later, he too was convicted of murdering his Canadian partner.
Source: BFM TV
