Charles Sobhraj not a free man yet, faces extradition to Thailand

Charles Sobhraj, who preyed on western backpackers on the hippie trail and killed 20 of them, is not yet a free man despite an order from the Supreme Court in Nepal.

Sobhraj, 78 and a heart patient, will take a flight out of Kathmandu only after top officials in Bangkok confirm there are no pending arrest warrants against the French serial killer in Thailand where he killed most of his victims.

Sobhraj, who has French citizenship and is of Indian and Vietnamese descent, has been linked to the killings of 20 foreign tourists across Thailand, India, and Nepal. He is said to have lured them in before drugging, robbing and murdering them.

Also Read: 'Bikini Killer' Charles Sobhraj to be freed from Nepal prison; a look at his life so far

Thailand government officials told Moneycontrol the arrest warrants were issued against Sobhraj in the 70s and more than five decades have passed since Sobhraj was arrested in Kathmandu’s crowded Thamel tourist zone in 2003.

“It is not a decision the Ministry of Justice will take, the government will take a call on crimes linked to Sobhraj and if the Thailand government will issue a fresh warrant or drop the previous warrant,” a senior official said in a brief telephonic interview.

“We are aware that most of his murders were committed in Thailand,” the official said further.

Meanwhile, Nepal will take Sobhraj out of the prison and keep him in isolation for 10 days to prepare his immigration papers to whichever country Sobhraj wishes to travel.

But there is a small hitch in this process: Thailand's longstanding demand to the Nepalese government to extradite Sobhraj. When the demand was made in the 70s, no one bothered. Many felt the Thai authorities will not press their charges, especially when the case is over five decades old.

Plans to relocate

Sobhraj was on December 21, 2022, released by the Supreme Court in Nepal where he was jailed for life for the murder of an American woman.

Lok Bhakta Rana, Sobhraj’s lawyer, told this reporter from Kathmandu that he was not aware of any pending arrest warrants in Thailand against his client. Rana said Sobhraj will be free to leave Kathmandu once the immigration office processes his papers. “It will take about a fortnight,” said Rana.

It was not immediately clear if Nihita Biswas, wife of Sobhraj, would travel with her husband. Biswas, 44 years Sobhraj’s junior and daughter of his lawyer, married him inside the Kathmandu prison in 2008. Biswas was present in the court when the judge — pronounced the judgement. The court ordered that Sobhraj be released on the basis of his age.

But the fear of a possible extradition to Thailand – claim sources in Kathmandu – did not deter Sobhraj from claiming repeatedly that he would lead a “whole new life”.

He has already indicated to his lawyers and journalists in Nepal that he could relocate to Dubai or even South Africa. He has not made it clear if he would return to settle in France, his motherland.

Soon after the order was announced, Sobhraj asked his lawyers to start the hunt for a top literary agent for his memoirs which he claimed would be the most definitive book on him and his life.

Sobhraj, who has been subject to several dramatisations, including the BBC/Netflix series, The Serpent, said he was not happy with any of the works and that he wanted his memoirs to be written by none other than himself. The Serpent depicted his targeting of western backpackers in India and Thailand.

“He is expecting a mega deal, and also cash from interviews he will give to newspapers and news channels,” said a top source in Nepal Police.

The source said Sobhraj’s popularity was on a high during his stay in the Kathmandu prison and he often helped fellow prisoners file their petitions by offering them legal advice. “Jail officials loved him and often visited his cell to hear his (bizarre) stories about the murders. And once in court, Sobhraj would deny everything,” the source further said.

Kathmandu Police, on the other hand, said they have information that despite being in jail, Sobhraj had links with members of Nepal’s notorious drug circuit and those involved in gold smuggling and money laundering.

Sobhraj had once claimed a dozen publishing agents were waiting to outbid each other for his biography. He has said he would like to write a prison memoir in the style of Jean Genet, the first chapter of which will be on how he spent the first seven months of imprisonment in leg-irons.

Sobhraj has said that filmmakers—including those from Hollywood—are waiting to sign up his script for a biopic. Sobhraj has even said that actor Brad Pitt is keen to do the title role. He has put a price of Rs 4 crore for the rights to the book.

Paul Tester, co-producer of The Serpent series, told the Los Angeles Times that he too found Sobhraj to be a hopeless liar. “Arrest warrants were issued for those murders but he successfully managed to avoid returning to Thailand, so they expired. Much of what’s known about the murders is from the mouth of Sobhraj himself, from interviews he gave to (biographer) Richard Neville. As with everything with Sobhraj, it’s difficult to verify where the truth ends and where the lies begin.”

Also Read: Will Charles 'Serpent' Sobhraj be forever in jail?

Life in Tihar

Sobhraj was caught by Indian cops and served a two-decade prison sentence from 1976. He had a luxurious spell behind bars in Delhi’s Tihar jail where he bribed guards with gems and large sums of money. He also gave some outrageous interviews to journalists from the UK and France, describing his killings and crimes in detail. He escaped briefly in 1986 when he drugged guards in his “luxury wing” but he was arrested in Goa and was returned to prison.

The child of an affair between an Indian businessman-tailor and one of his Vietnamese shop assistants, Sobhraj had grown up in Saigon during the Vietnamese war of independence from France.

Sobhraj was given a life sentence in 2004 for the killing of Connie Jo Bronzich, a 29-year-old American, in 1975. He was convicted in 2014 of the 1975 murder of Laurent Carrière, a 26-year-old Canadian.

Andrew Anthony of The Guardian of London wrote in December 2020 about his meeting with meeting Sobhraj in Paris after the Vietnamese-Indian Frenchman was freed from the Indian jail. “Sobhraj was represented by the infamous lawyer Jacques Vergès, nicknamed the “devil’s advocate” because his roster of clients included the Nazi Klaus Barbie, Slobodan Milosevic and the renowned international terrorist Carlos the Jackal.”

“Sobhraj wanted payment for the interview but I refused and, to my surprise, he agreed to talk. I had never been much interested in serial killers but I happened to read Richard Neville’s and Julie Clarke’s extraordinary account of the killings, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, just before Sobhraj’s release was announced. I couldn’t quite believe that someone who had confessed to a number of the murders to Neville, and against whom there was a wealth of compelling evidence, was free to walk the streets of a European capital,” wrote Anthony.

The murders

Irresistibly drawn to all kinds of crimes ranging from street muggings, car thefts and robbing rich housewives of their cash at gunpoint, Sobhraj and his partner embarked on a manic crime spree across Europe and Asia around the 70s when the world was getting used to the hippy trail where youngsters travelled to distant lands with little cash and ended up in India, Nepal and the Far East Asian countries.

“A generation was looking to find itself by getting lost or high somewhere off the beaten track. No one took much notice of who came and went. It was in this transient milieu that Sobhraj stole from impressionable travellers,” wrote Anthony.

‘Narcissistic, psychopath’

But Sobhraj was different when he met Anthony in Paris. “He was more interested in portraying himself as a victim: of western imperialism, a dysfunctional childhood, racism and institutionalisation. At one moment he would lapse into philosophical musings, the next make a blackly mordant joke. He was narcissistic, amusing, teasing and, it had to be said, a psychopath,” wrote Anthony.

“Sobhraj always had the right connections and that extra cash, and also gems that he loved and bartered for deals,” said the source in Kathmandu.

Interestingly, Herman Knippenberg, the former diplomat-turned-detective, who worked for over two decades to gather evidence against Sobhraj, was honoured in April this year by the Dutch King for his role in nabbing the serial killer.

Dutch King Willem Alexander appointed Knippenberg a Knight in the Order of Orange Nassau for his relentless pursuit over more than two decades of Sobhraj when he was based in Bangkok and attacking tourists. Knippenberg, who lives in Wellington with his second wife, former New Zealand diplomat Vanessa, was the third secretary at the Dutch embassy in Thailand in the 1970s when Bangkok-based Sobhraj was attacking tourists.

The Daily Stuff of New Zealand said in a report that Knippenberg kept the file of evidence – hundreds of pages of documents and photographs – handing them over to Interpol in Nepal where Sobhraj was arrested. “Among the copies of documents Knippenberg has kept 46 years on is a letter dated 12 August 1976, from the FBI which acknowledged he was “instrumental” in having Sobhraj arrested at an early stage and thereby probably limiting the number of his potential victims.”

“Serendipitously, Knippenberg received the Dutch King’s honour, awarded for longstanding meritorious service to society, 46 years ago to the day that he and his colleagues searched Sobhraj’s abandoned Bangkok apartment where they gathered boxes of evidence. It was a grim cache, Knippenberg told the daily; “There were tonnes of documents. The number of medicines was enough to fill a medium-sized pharmacy.”

That was almost five decades ago. If the Thai authorities drop the charges, then Sobhraj would be a free man, after spending half his life in prisons in Asia and Europe.