Humanitarian work? I declined the offer but asked him to tell me why hed come to Nepal. On the eve of the interview, the Nepali authorities changed their minds, and we returned home empty-handed. Some years after that I read that he had been visited by a hired assassin in prison, who then attempted to murder one of his fellow inmates in debt to some bigwig on the outside. It's a front for selling arms. Then he headed back to Asia with a plan to bust Compagnon out of jail. The couple married when Sobhraj was released and embarked on an epic crime spree across Europe and Asia, before settling in Mumbai with a newborn child and a profitable trade in stolen cars. 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Charles Sobhraj is bundled into a police van in Delhi in 1997, shortly after his release from jail. At 67 he was still in good shape, though he seemed to have aged a lot in the time since Id seen him, and he was particularly self-conscious about having lost his hair. I hope to live for many years to come', Charles Sobhraj (left); his cell in a Kathmandu prison in 2016. There are disturbing descriptions throughout this episode. Mention Charles Sobhraj in India, everybody knows, north to south. . We bundled ourselves off to Delhi and landed ourselves in a moral quagmire. Serpentine. We were both having nightmares that Sobhraj was chasing us, or suddenly appearing in our room. I dont want to say more about that its a private matter. Four days after the Himalayan Times ran its story, deputy superintendent Ganesh arrested Sobhraj at the Casino Royale. However, he broke out of prison and faced another decade in jail after he was caught. He thought that, secretly, he harboured a wish to return to prison, even if once there he would spend all his time trying to get out. I asked Biswas how she would feel if she discovered that her husband was indeed a killer. They fell in love. "This is Charles, Charles Sobhraj." Sobhraj was now in full flow, describing each murder in detail. He became a famous outlaw in India. Back in the Seventies, Sobhraj murdered at least ten people, mostly Western travellers along the Asian hippie trail. He looked small and inconsequential, but better than any 68-. year-old who's spent the last ten years in a decrepit prison has any right to look. Lets say only that meeting was in relation to some matter linked to Pakistan. He escaped from three prisons in three different countries. Its OK. Are you in contact with Indian intelligence agencies? In early 2013 I entered Kathmandu prison, the only journalist to get access to him after the attempted murder. "They couldn't help me because I was undercover.". Not only did he know that Sobhraj was guilty, he said, the case was a matter of personal catharsis. The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj: The True Story of the Killer who inspired the hit BBC drama Neville, Richard, Clarke, Buy Charles Sobhraj: Inside the Heart . (In case those names don't sound familiar, they're renamed Willem and Helena in the series.) He was a charismatic figure, fluent in several languages, and finely tuned to what budget travellers wanted. He proposed to her within weeks and promised to go straight. He was also a student of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's "will to power". Sign up for our Celebrity & Entertainment newsletter. Sobhraj made sure he had those connections. In 2003, Sobhraj was arrested once more in Nepal, then later convicted for the 1975 murders of American Connie Jo Bronzich and Canadian Laurent Carrire. He would befriend them, advise them on where to eat and how to buy gemstones, sometimes put them up at the Bangkok apartment he shared with his French-Canadian girlfriend, and then kill them. In July 1976 Sobhraj was on the run in India, wanted for several murders in Thailand and two in Nepal. The door opened and he beckoned me in. A foreign diplomat told me that the French embassy made no secret of its arrangement with Kathamandu Central Jail, in which the two institutions referred potential visitors back and forth to each other until they gave up. "I was looking to set up a heroin deal on behalf of the Taliban.". "But I was also working for the CIA," he added, as I'm still trying to put the pieces together. "It's an incredible story. Young idealists, trusting backpackers and hash-smoking stoners were looking to get lost, and Sobhraj made sure some of them were never found. I dont know, lets see after the publication of my bookThere could be a future Hindi movie. For the poor Nepali inmates, its a question of survival life or death. 2 weeks ago, The Serpent: Is the 1997 Charles Sobhraj Interview Real? Accused of murdering dozens of Western tourists across Thailand, Nepal and India in the 1970s, Charles Sobhraj's life story has spawned multiple books, a movie, and a new BBC miniseries on Netflix. Instead it was left to a junior Dutch diplomat looking for the missing Dutch couple, Henk Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker, who became Sobhrajs nemesis. If Sobhraj's greatest criminal weakness was his propensity to be caught, it was offset by an impressive strength: his ability to escape. "I had a lot of female visitors," he told me, "mainly journalists and MA students. , Awesome, Youre All Set! He joins the dots and (spoiler alert) presents the information to the Thai police, who arrest Sobhraj but then, through a mixture of incompetence and complacency, allow him to escape. He is obsessed with preventing anyone from exploiting his life for financial gain and threatened to sue the writer. He was always studying character, alive to any signs of weakness that could be exploited. The child of an affair between an Indian businessman-tailor and one of his Vietnamese shop assistants, Sobhraj (played in the BBC drama by French actor Tahar Rahim) had grown up in Saigon during the Vietnamese war of independence from France. Those hands had snapped necks.) Are you still in touch with him? In any case, Sobhraj, perhaps surprisingly, is not a man to bear a grudge. 1 day ago, by Yerin Kim They are the only things in his misspent life that hes ever been able to hold on to. However she remains a staunch advocate of his cause and the attention she has garnered, due to her husband, hasn't been all bad. Chowdury, the only other person who could shed light on why petty theft escalated to brutal murder, disappeared in 1976 after travelling with Sobhraj to Malaysia. Charles Sobhraj spoke to press on a plane after being freed Sobhraj has been linked to more than 20 killings between 1972 and 1982, in which the victims were drugged, strangled, beaten or burned. I changed the topic and asked about Chantal Compagnon. But his first and abiding love was Chantal Compagnon, a French woman from a deeply conservative background. In mid-70s Bangkok, Dutchman Herman Knippenberg was tasked with finding two missing travellers. Well, you already know about it After Masood Azhars release following the Indian Airline hijacking incident (in 1999), The Indian Express had mentioned my role with the Government of India at that time. BBC's (and now Netflix's) The Serpent opens with a title card that reads, "In 1997 an American news crew tracked Charles Sobhraj down to Paris where he was living as a free man." The. Definitely. t was 1977 and my boyfriend and I were working as journalists in New York. From Bangkok to Bombay, Charles Sobhraj left a trail of destruction wherever he ventured. Complaining that he had paid all the necessary bribes, Sobhraj still insisted he was about to be released any day. He didn't show Dhondy the emails but asked him to help him sell the story. Although he tried to keep me off balance by, for example, driving me to an empty restaurant in the outer suburbs of Paris, he didn't seem scary. Now you can ask your questions.. A week after I published a damning profile, Sobhraj called me at the Observer office. In its latest report, Transparency International has classified Nepal as the third most corrupt country after Afghanistan and Bangladesh. Richard speedily learned the arts of bribery and corruption and arranged regular access to interview him. He greeted me warmly as if I were an old friend. She also became his accomplice in theft and murder and ended up in an Indian prison, and died of cancer four years after her release. Several times when different police forces had him within their grasp, he coolly assumed the identity of another person - usually one of his victims - and talked his way out. 2 April 2021 by Stacey Nguyen. Also, as the inmates are kept on a starving diet, the yearly incidence of death is quite high. "I said, 'You're the serial killer.' The calls from Kathmandu were mostly when he was taken out of jail for a court hearing or a visit to the hospital. In the interview, Sobhraj spoke about his arrest from a casino in Nepal in 2003, his stint in Delhis Tihar Jail between 1976 and 1997, and the book and movie releases that he was part of then. Even if the hired killer had been in collusion with Sobhraj, that didn't explain how he entered the prison with a gun - unless someone at the self-same prison authorities turned a blind eye. In 1979 Thomas Thompson added an equally disturbing portrait with. Our writer recalls his bizarre meetings with a charmer and psychopath, At the beginning of The Serpent, the new BBC drama series based on the exploits of a real-life serial killer, a title page declares: In 1997 an American TV crew tracked Charles Sobhraj down to Paris where he was living as a free man.. Charles Bronson is Britain's most notorious criminal. When he had been in prison in India, women threw themselves at him, and he dropped each one as the next showed her face. No one took much notice of who came and went. The place was empty but, said Sobhraj, it belonged to a friend. The Midnight Hour: The Serpent (Charles Sobhraj) 133,134 views Feb 4, 2020 200 Dislike Share Save UTD TV 2.37K subscribers This week in the season 2 premiere of The Midnight Hour, your fellow. I hope to live for many years to come. "He can't deal with the outside world," said Dhondy. 10 hours ago, by Eden Arielle Gordon Charles Sobhraj exclusive interview: 'I am going straight back to France to my family I hope to live for many years to come' With the master of guile set to take his flight to freedom at age 78, the world may finally get to hear from the man himself - the chronicles, claims and conspiracy theories that make up Charles Sobhraj. Upon release after his 12-year sentence, he was to be extradited to Thailand to potentially face the death penalty for several murders. This, then, was the man outside whose hotel room I stood on a warm spring day in Paris in 1997. Sobhraj was not amused. He went on to explain that he had been working as an arms dealer to, among others, the Taliban, courtesy of an introduction from the Islamist terrorist leader Masood Azhar, a friend from his days in Tihar prison. In The Guardian, Observer reporter Andrew Anthony detailed his own experience talking with Sobhraj. Sobhraj wanted payment for the interview but I refused and, to my surprise, he agreed to talk. In fact, his relationship with Compagnon continued until less than three years ago, when she was threatened on the phone by an angry Nihita Biswas. I was to leave but someone warned me to be careful, saying Nepal was then facing a Maoist insurgency and the police and courts didnt respect any law or rules. But is the opening interview in the limited series based on actual events? With the pair of them I got into a small car and we drove around Paris, heading out to the suburbs beyond the Priphrique. "She left her husband and came back to Paris when she heard that I was back," he said with proprietorial pride, referring to his return in 1997. As The Serpent shows, Bangkok in 1976 was a place where anyone with the right connections and spare cash could evade unwanted police attention. With BBC drama The Serpent now streaming on Netflix in the US, Nige Tassell reveals the story of the brazen career criminal who graduated from petty theft to cold-blooded murder. We seemed to drive for ages, until I had no idea where we were. Until quite recently it was a monarchist state in which the royal family lived lives of extraordinary luxury amid the surrounding squalor endured by most of its subjects. Both titles played on the Serpent, the nickname Sobhraj had been given by the press because he was cunning and slippery, capable of beguiling sang-froid and poisonous violence. Forever enterprising, the first thing Sobhraj had done after his arrest was sell the rights to his life story to a Bangkok businessman, who sold them on to Random House, who asked Richard to immediately get to Delhi. "Johnson turned up on his bicycle," recalled Dhondy. Like other career criminals Ive met, he was a stickler for the letter of the law when he thought it might help his case. As Leclerc wrote in her diary, "I swore to myself to try all means to make him love me, but little by little I became his slave." Yet almost 30 years later Sobhraj returned to Nepal and was arrested, tried and sentenced to 20 years in jail. Often with the former nurse Leclercs help, he drugged them, led them to believe they had contracted a tropical bug, and prevented them from leaving his apartments on the top floor of Kanit House in Bangkok. The only certainty is that the Serpent will not slip away to a quiet retirement in the French countryside. 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Thanks to evidence preserved and provided by his old adversary Knippenberg, he was found guilty and given a life sentence. He wore a playful but challenging smile as I politely declined his offer. He was relying on Dhondy to put his case. Glaring injustices and abuse of power are a conspicuous part of everyday life, so it was not particularly shocking that a famous serial killer wanted for two murders in Nepal was gambling openly at the capital's main casino. (Credit: Charles Sobhraj), Charles Sobhraj exclusive interview: I am going straight back to France to my family I hope to live for many years to come, An Express Investigation Part Four | Compensatory afforestation neither compensates nor forest: 60% funds unused, An Express Investigation Part Three: Red flags, Indias green certification under cloud, Conflict Wood: Under sanctions, prized Myanmar teak finds its way to US, EU markets via India, Recalling the life and crimes of Bikini killer Charles Sobhraj, A brash fellow: retired cop who arrested Sobhraj recalls how he nabbed him at a Goa restaurant. But first he was imprisoned in Greece he escaped by swapping identities with his younger brother. He was jailed in India again for a period during which, according to CNN, the time where he could be tried for. The chilling evidence he uncovered put Sobhraj behind bars with a life sentence. Great, Click the Allow Button Above It proved the last straw for his wife. In 2003, Sobhraj was arrested once more in Nepal, then later convicted for the 1975 murders of American Connie Jo Bronzich and Canadian Laurent Carrire. After all, I cannot now face trial . On her release in Kabul, she met an American and moved with him and her daughter to the US. But what was it? I feel 30!" But hed acquired a third wife, an attractive 24-year-old, Nikita Biswas, the daughter of his Nepali lawyer. He had been captured in 1976 while drugging 60 French engineering students in Delhi. "Hello, Andrew," whispered a distinctive French accent. I couldnt see Sobhraj ever coming clean he would positively savour the drama of withholding a confession but they entered discussions with him. Many have speculated that Sobhraj murdered him, though he denied it when I asked him. He looked a curiously slight figure, his skin remarkably smooth, even youthful, given that hed spent the past two decades in an Indian jail. Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. His efforts to sell his prison memoirs came to nothing, however, and six years later he was arrested in Nepal for the murders in December 1975 of a 28-year-old American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich and her friend, a Canadian by the name of Laurent Carrire, whose mutilated corpses were found that Christmas in fields near Kathmandu. Michaela Jae Rodriguez put on a very leggy display at the 2023 Film Independent Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, California, on Saturday. In Paris he told me that when it gets hot, I go to the kitchen. As she would later write from her prison cell: I swore to myself to try all means to make him love me, but little by little I became his slave.. . Hed also left behind a trail of broken women. The suggestion was that Sobhraj was part of another murder plot.