OSBC Osun State Broadcasting Corporation
A French serial killer known as The Serpent, convicted of several tourist murders in Asia in the 1970s, has been released from a Nepalese prison.
Charles Sobhraj, 78, was freed after a court ruled in favour of his age and good behaviour.
He spent 19 years in jail in Nepal for killing two North Americans in 1975.
Sobhraj, whose story was covered in the TV drama The Serpent, had preyed on mostly young Western backpackers on the hippie trail in India and Thailand.
The notorious killer had been concurrently serving two sentences, each 20 years, in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu for the 1975 murder of an American woman, Connie Jo Bronzich, and her Canadian backpacker friend, Laurent Carriere.
He had been convicted in two separate trials – most recently in 2014, when he was sentenced to a high security prison for murdering Carriere.
But Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered Sobhraj’s release after his legal team successfully filed a petition claiming he should be given a concession on his prison term due to health reasons.
