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French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, whose series of murders in Asia in the 1970s was portrayed in the Netflix series The Serpent, was still waiting to be released from prison on Thursday after a Nepalese court ordered his release on health reasons.
The Supreme Court in Kathmandu ruled on Wednesday that Sobhraj, 78, who has been in prison in the Himalayan Republic since 2003 for two murders decades ago, should be immediately released and deported within 15 days.
He underwent open-heart surgery in 2017, and his release complied with the law which provides for the compassionate release of bedridden prisoners who have served three quarters of their sentence, the verdict states.
Sobhraj is expected to return to France but won’t leave prison until Friday, his lawyer said, despite earlier signs that his release was imminent.
“He is back in central prison today. He will be sent to the immigration department tomorrow,” his lawyer, Gopal Shiwakoti Chintan, told reporters on Thursday.
Ishwari Prasad Pandey, a prison guard at the Central Prison, told Reuters that he would be released on Friday morning.
Sobhraj was expected to be released from jail on Thursday but it took time to complete pre-release procedures, including a health checkup, Pandey said.
A spokesperson for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs told AFP that the embassy in Nepal was monitoring the situation.
“If an expulsion request is made to them, France would have to grant this request, as Mr. Sobhraj is a French citizen.”
Sobhraj began traveling the world in the early 1970s and ended up in the Thai capital Bangkok.
He posed as a gemstone dealer and befriended his victims, including many western backpackers on the 1970s hippie trail, before drugging, robbing, and murdering them.
“He despised backpackers; he regarded them as poor, young drug addicts,” Australian journalist Julie Clarke, who interviewed Sobhraj, told AFP last year.
He was polite and sophisticated and was involved in his first murder in 1975, that of a young American woman whose body was found in a bikini on a beach.
He was nicknamed the “bikini killer” and was eventually linked to more than 20 murders.
Sobhraj’s other nickname, “The Serpent,” was based on his ability to assume other identities to avoid justice.
It became the title of last year’s hit series on the BBC and Netflix, which was based on his life.
“He looked harmless”
He was arrested in India in 1976 and ended up spending 21 years in prison there, with a short break in 1986 when he escaped and was caught again in the Indian coastal state of Goa.
Sobhraj escaped from Tihar prison in India in 1986 after drugging prison guards with cookies and cakes as well as sleeping pills. Days later, he was caught by police in a restaurant.
Sobhraj was released in 1997 and lived in Paris, where he gave paid interviews with journalists, but returned to Nepal in 2003.
He was soon discovered in the tourist district of Kathmandu by journalist Joseph Nathan, now an adviser to the daily newspaper Himalayan Times, and arrested in a casino.
“He looked harmless… It was pure luck that I recognized him,” Nathan told AFP on Thursday. “I think it was karma.”
A court there imposed a life sentence on him the following year for killing US tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. A decade later, he was also found guilty of killing Bronzich’s Canadian companion.