Serial killer Charles Sobhraj will be freed from prison after spending more than 19 years in a hell-hole Nepalese jail.
Master manipulator Sobhraj – whose reign of terror was the subject of BBC ’s hit drama The Serpent – murdered as many as 24 young travellers on the so-called Hippy Trail in the Seventies.
But on Wednesday, December 21, Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled Sobhraj, 78, should be freed on health grounds.
Hearing a writ of habeas corpus, the joint bench of judges Sapna Malla Pradhan and Til Prasad Shrestha ordered his release from Kathmandu’s Central Jail.
The court has also ordered the authorities to deport him within 15 days.
Now a source has said that he will try to cash-in on his notoriety and sign lucrative contracts to tell his story.
An insider said: “Sobhraj has been fighting for years to be released and has even claimed he’s innocent.
“But now he’s going to be freed, he thinks that he’s going to earn a big pay-out for telling his story.”
Sobhraj was handed a life sentence for the double murder of American backpacker Connie Jo Boronzich, 29, and Canadian tourist Laurent Carrière, 26.
But he has been linked with as many as two dozen murders across Nepal, India, Malaysia and Thailand in a killing spree that earned him The Serpent moniker for slithering away from justice.
More than 31 million Brits have watched the BBC drama in which Sobhraj is played by French actor Tahar Rahim.
Jenna Coleman plays his glamorous French-Canadian lover, Marie-Andree Leclerc.
Despite serving nearly 20 years in jail, Sobhraj has claimed he wants to broker a lucrative film deal with Virgin tycoon Richard Branson to sell his story.
In an interview from his prison cell, Sobhraj claimed airline billionaire Branson, 72, would be interested in making a movie about his life.
He said: “I’m absolutely innocent in these cases. I want to propose a movie deal.”
Sobhraj received his first jail sentence for burglary in Paris in 1963 and after being paroled he split his time between Parisian high society and the criminal underworld.
He accumulated wealth through a series of burglaries, car thefts and scams, which led to years on the run using stolen passports.
During the 1970s and 1980s Sobhraj used his knowledge of gems and of the backpacker route across South East Asia to lure unsuspecting westerners into his circle of friends.
He then tried to involve them in his money-making scams before poisoning them if they refused.
He was initially dubbed the Bikini Killer after victims he targeted were found wearing just swimwear but later became known as The Serpent.
Having repeatedly slipped through the net by the time he was caught in 1976 he was Interpol’s most wanted man.
Along with lover Leclerc he was finally caught in Delhi, India, and sentenced to 12 years’ jail for the attempted robbery of a group of French students.
Leclerc was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and allowed to return home to Canada, where she died in 1984, aged 38.
Sobhraj, under a 20-year arrest warrant, was still wanted for murder in Thailand, where he was likely to face the death penalty.
So in 1986, two years before he was due to be released, he staged a party for his guards, drugged them and escaped.
As he hoped, his sentence in India was extended by a decade and the 20-year arrest warrant expired – meaning he was never extradited for murder.
In 1997, Sobhraj, then 52, walked free and returned to Paris for a comfortable life cashing in on his infamy.
Then, inexplicably, he flew to Nepal in 2003 where he was arrested for a number of murders and jailed.
He claimed he returned because he was working as an arms dealer for the Taliban in Pakistan and passing information to America’s Central Intelligence Agency.
