PARIS: Charles Sobhraj, a convicted killer who police believe murdered more than 20 western backpackers on the “hippie trail” through Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, arrived in France on Saturday after nearly two decades behind bars in Nepal.
Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered the release of Sobhraj, known as “The Serpent” for his evasion of police, earlier this week on health grounds.
On Friday he was released and put on a flight at Kathmandu airport to take him to Paris via Doha. While on the flight to Doha, he insisted to an AFP journalist that he was “innocent”.
On arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, he was taken away by French border police for extra “identity checks”, according to an airport source.
The source said he had left the airport, evading a media scrum waiting in the arrivals hall.
His French lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, told reporters at the airport she was “very happy” he had been released, adding that he had been “unjustly sentenced in a fabricated case with false documents by the Nepali police”.
He had been held in a high-security prison in Nepal since 2003, when he was arrested on charges of murdering American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. He was later found guilty of killing Bronzich’s Canadian friend, Laurent Carriere, and had served 19 years out of a 20-year sentence.
Sobhraj told the French news agency AFP on the flight out of Nepal that he was not guilty of murdering Bronzich and Carriere and that the case against him was built on fake documents.
“I have a lot to do. I have to sue a lot of people,” AFP quoted Sobhraj as saying.
Associates have previously described Sobhraj, 78, as a con artist, a seducer, a robber and a murderer.
In 2021, the BBC and Netflix produced a drama series based on the story of Sobhraj’s alleged killings.
