A French serial killer known as Serpent, convicted of several murders of tourists in Asia in the 1970s, has returned to France after being released from prison in Nepal.
Charles Sobhraj, 78, was released after a court ruled in favor of his age and good behavior.
He spent 19 years in prison in Nepal for killing two North Americans in 1975.
Sobhraj had mainly preyed on young Western backpackers on the hippie trail in India and Thailand.
He was deported to France on Friday and would have been banned from returning to Nepal for at least 10 years.
The notorious killer, whose story was covered in the TV drama The Serpent, was simultaneously serving two sentences, each 20 years, in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, for the 1975 murder of an American, Connie Jo Bronzich, and his Canadian backpacker friend. , Laurent Carriere.
He had been convicted in two separate trials – the most recent in 2014, when he was sent to a maximum security prison for Carrière’s murder.
But Nepal’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered Sobhraj’s release after his legal team successfully filed a petition demanding that he should be granted a concession on his prison sentence on health grounds.
A provision of Nepalese law also allows prisoners who have demonstrated good character and who have served 75% of their prison sentence to be released.
“Keeping him in prison permanently does not comply with the prisoner’s human rights,” the verdict said, according to AFP, citing regular treatment for heart disease as another factor in his release. He underwent heart surgery in 2017.
In an interview with AFP ahead of his departure on Friday, Sobhraj said he felt “good” about regaining his freedom, but would seek legal action against the Nepalese government.
Sobhraj has been linked to more than 20 killings between 1972 and 1982, in which the victims were drugged, strangled, beaten or burned.
He was dubbed The Serpent or the Bikini Killer for his knack for deceptive disguises, ability to escape prison and tendency to target young women. It later became the title for a hit BBC and Netflix series about the killer, which was released in 2021.
Before his two convictions in Kathmandu, Sobhraj had already spent two decades in jail in India for poisoning a busload of French tourists.
During that time, he briefly managed to escape from prison by drugging the prison guards. He later claimed the escape was a ploy to get his sentence extended and avoid extradition to Thailand, where he was wanted for five more murders.
Thai authorities had issued a warrant for him in the mid-1970s on charges of drugging and killing six women, some who were found dead on a beach near the resort town of Pattaya.
Following his release from India in 1997, Sobhraj returned to France where he lived in Paris and gave paid interviews to journalists.
But he returned to Nepal and was arrested for Bronzich’s murder in 2003 after being spotted by a reporter in a casino in Kathmandu
