After spending 19 years in a Nepali jail, ‘the Serpent’ says he plans to sue for his imprisonment and chase series deals.
Late last year, after spending 19 years in a Nepali jail, 79-year-old convicted murderer Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj was revelling in his new-found freedom. The day after Christmas, a text message from Sobhraj landed on my phone, sent from a hotel in Paris: “It’s 6am and I am in my first bathtub since many years. Feels so nice.”A few hours later, a picture of his Boxing Day breakfast arrived: three types of cheese, salami and prunes on a white plate next to a cup of black coffee. “Have breakfast,” he wrote.Three days previously, Sobhraj, a French citizen, had been released from Kathmandu Central Jail where he had been imprisoned for the murder of two backpackers in 1975.It was not his first time in prison. Sobhraj has spent more than 40 years in different prisons, including in Athens and Tehran, and 21 years in India on charges including murder. It was during his time in Delhi’s high-security Tihar Jail in the 1990s when I first met Sobhraj. Back then I was a crime reporter in the Indian capital and would often interview him.
In the 1970s, Sobhraj stalked the “hippie trail” in Asia befriending young, unsuspecting, Western backpackers to rob them of their passports and money after spiking their drinks and meals with laxatives and sleeping pills.
Sobhraj would use his victims’ identities – names and passports – in one country to travel to another where he would commit more crimes and continue the pattern, creating a maze of stolen, shifting identities. Dubbed “the Serpent” for his ability to evade the authorities in different countries, Sobhraj has been linked to more than 10 murders in Nepal, India, Pakistan and Thailand, and is suspected of more, but has been convicted of just two.