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Charles Sobhraj has been serving a prison sentence in Nepal since 2003
French serial killer Charles Soubraj, better known as “The Serpent”, has left Nepal after his release from prison.
Sobraj, 78, was convicted of killing several tourists in Asia in the 1970s.
Subraj was released after a court ruled that, due to his advanced age as well as his good behaviour.
Sobhraj spent 19 years in a Nepalese prison for killing two North Americans in 1975.
Most of Subraj’s victims were young Western men and women known as hippies. The thug would raid them during their travels in India and Thailand.
Sobraj was deported to France on Friday and banned from returning to Nepal for at least 10 years.
The TV drama dealt with the story of the serial killer Sobraj, in a series called “The Serpent” or the Serpent.
At one time, Sobraj served two 20-year prison sentences in the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu, for the murder he committed in 1975 of an American woman named Connie Jo Brunsich and her Canadian friend, Laurent Carrier.
Sobhraj was convicted in two separate trials – the last of which took place in 2014, and was sentenced to a maximum security prison after being found guilty of murdering Canadian Carrier.
But Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered Subraj’s release on Wednesday, after his defense team successfully petitioned for his pardon on health grounds.
The French butcher underwent heart surgery in 2017.
Nepalese law allows for the release of prisoners who have demonstrated good behavior and have served 75 percent of their sentence.
In an interview with Agence France-Presse, Subraj said before his departure on Friday that he was overjoyed to be given his freedom, but that he would take legal action against the Nepalese government.
Charles Sobrague spoke to the press on a plane after his release
Subraj’s name has been linked to more than 20 murders that took place between 1972 and 1982. The victims of these crimes were either drugged, suffocated, beaten or burned.
Sobraj was nicknamed the Snake or the Bikini Killer, due to his talent for disguise, his ability to escape from prison and his tendency to target young women. In 2021, the BBC and the Netflix platform broadcast the Serpent series, which deals with the dramatic story of Sobraj.
Prior to his conviction for the two murders in Kathmandu, Sobraj had spent twenty years in prison in India, as punishment for poisoning a group of French tourists.
Meanwhile, Subraj managed to escape from prison by drugging the guards. He then claimed that he had only done so to extend his prison term so that he would not be deported to Thailand where he was wanted for five more murders.
The authorities in Thailand had issued an arrest warrant for Sobraj in the mid-1970s on charges of drugging and killing six women, the bodies of a number of them were found on a beach near the resort of Pattaya.
Following his release from India in 1997, Sobhraj returned to France, where he lived in Paris and interviewed journalists. But he returned to Nepal and there in 2003 he was arrested for the murder of American Brunsich after he was located in a hotel in the capital, Kathmandu.