Charles Sobhraj was arrested in a Kathmandu casino in September 2003, days after The Himalayan Times printed a front-page story saying he was living in the city's tourist district. He was 59, a French citizen who had spent more than 20 years in Indian prisons and had lived openly in Paris since 1997, giving paid interviews. Nepali police charged him with murders that had happened in the Kathmandu Valley in December 1975: Connie Jo Bronzich, an American, and Laurent Carrière, a Canadian, both young travelers. He said he had never set foot in Nepal before 2003. A Kathmandu court convicted him of the Bronzich murder in 2004, and a second Nepali court convicted him of the Carrière murder in 2014.
Those two convictions are the only murder convictions that stand against him. In the mid-1970s Thai police linked him to the deaths of several young travelers around Bangkok and Pattaya, which earned him the name the Bikini Killer, and police and reporters have linked him to more than 20 deaths across Asia. He was never tried in Thailand, and the Thai case lapsed while he was in prison in India. His biographers say he admitted at least 12 killings and later took the admissions back. In December 2022 Nepal's Supreme Court ordered him freed because of his age and his conduct in prison, and he was flown to France. He has since said that he never killed anyone.
Sobhraj was born in Saigon on April 6, 1944, when Vietnam was under French rule. His father was an Indian businessman and his mother Vietnamese; she later married a French soldier, according to AFP. Britannica gives his original name as Gurmukh Sobhraj. In Nepali court records and reporting he is Charles Gurumukh Sobhraj, and the French passport police found on him in 2003 named him Charles Sobhraj Gurmukh.
He was first jailed in Paris in 1963, for burglary, CNN has reported. From then on, AFP's account says, he lived by crime across borders, moving through Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He went to India in 1970. In 1971 he was arrested there over a jewelry robbery, fled while on bail to Greece, was arrested again and escaped. By 2006 The Himalayan Times counted five escapes from custody, in Afghanistan, France, Greece, Iran and India, and he has been accused of crimes in France, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, India, Thailand and Malaysia. His ability to change identities and slip out of custody earned him the name the Serpent.
He was articulate and persuasive. In a 1979 interview with the Australian writer Richard Neville, quoted by AFP, he said: "As long as I can talk to people, I can manipulate them." Police later described him as a persuasive con man, and AFP reported in 2007 that he was a self-taught martial artist.
In 1975 Sobhraj arrived in Bangkok with a Canadian girlfriend and an Indian associate and set himself up as a dealer in precious stones, AFP has reported. The girlfriend was Marie-Andrée Leclerc, a French Canadian. The associate was Ajay Chowdhury, an Indian man of 22 who, according to the veteran Asia correspondent John McBeth, took an active part in some of the killings. They lived at Kanit House, an apartment block in Bangkok that has since been demolished and replaced by a condominium.
Bangkok was a stop on the overland route between Europe and Asia that young Westerners then traveled with cash, traveler's checks and passports. Sobhraj befriended travelers, drugged them and robbed them, according to the accounts of police and reporters, and he used their passports for his own trips, which AFP links to the gem and drug trades. Those who became a danger to him were killed, police have alleged. Alan Dawson, a former UPI correspondent who interviewed him, told McBeth that Sobhraj gave his motive as revenge against white people for enslaving Asians with drugs.
In October 1975 the body of a young woman wearing a bikini was found on the beach at Pattaya, on the Gulf of Thailand, AFP has reported. She was Teresa Knowlton, an American; the Associated Press, citing a National Geographic documentary, has described her as a young woman from Seattle. McBeth writes that she had been to a party at Sobhraj's apartment shortly before. Knowlton's death gave rise to the name the Bikini Killer.
Other deaths followed. The Associated Press, again citing the National Geographic documentary, has named Vitali Hakim, a young Sephardic Jew whose burned body was found near a Pattaya resort where Sobhraj and his companions were staying. Henk Bintanja, 29, and his fiancée Cornelia Hemker, 25, were a Dutch couple traveling through Asia; McBeth describes Bintanja as a Dutch-born Indonesian. They were drugged and strangled, and their bodies were burned by a roadside north of Bangkok. CNN has reported that the two charred bodies were found near Ayutthaya, about 80 kilometers north of the city, and that the couple had been alive when they were set on fire.
Reuters has reported that Thai police alleged he drugged and killed six women there in the 1970s, some of them found on a beach near Pattaya. A 1997 Los Angeles Times report said he might have killed 14 people in Thailand alone, and the Associated Press has said he faced 14 murder charges there. When India agreed in late 1985 to a Thai extradition request, the request concerned two deaths: those of Teresa Knowlton and a Turkish tourist, according to AFP. No court has ever ruled on any of the Thai deaths.
From Bangkok, Sobhraj and Leclerc flew to Kathmandu on the passports of the Dutch couple, McBeth writes. According to the case later put to a Nepali court, as The Himalayan Times reported in 2004, he entered Nepal in 1975 as a Dutch national named Henricus Bintanja, on passport S 428929, and stayed at the Hotel Malla and the Soaltee Oberoi.
Connie Jo Bronzich was 29 and came from Santa Cruz, California. Laurent Carrière was 26 and Canadian. McBeth describes him as her boyfriend; Reuters calls him her friend and companion. In late December 1975 their bodies were found two days apart at roadside spots in the Kathmandu Valley, AFP reported in 2007. Both had been stabbed and burned. Friends of the two travelers suspected a gem dealer, described as Vietnamese, whom Bronzich had met. McBeth writes that Sobhraj and Leclerc then returned to Bangkok on the passports of Bronzich and Carrière.
Nepali police filed two murder cases, one at the Kathmandu District Court and one at the Bhaktapur District Court, The Himalayan Times later reported. A retired police officer later testified at Sobhraj's trial that police had kept him under surveillance at his hotel once he became a suspect. Nothing more happened in either case for decades, and by the time Sobhraj returned the files could not be found.
The man who connected the deaths in Thailand was Herman Knippenberg, a junior diplomat at the Netherlands embassy in Bangkok, aged 31 by CNN's account and 32 by McBeth's. In early 1976 he received a letter from the family of Cornelia Hemker. She and Henk Bintanja had written home regularly as they traveled, and the family had heard nothing for six weeks. Two charred bodies found near Ayutthaya had been reported as a missing Australian couple, who later turned up alive. On March 3, 1976, at the Bangkok police morgue, a Dutch dentist compared dental records with the bodies. "It's them," the dentist said, as Knippenberg recalled for CNN.
A friend at the Belgian embassy, Paul Siemons, had told Knippenberg about a French gem dealer calling himself Alain Gautier, one of Sobhraj's aliases, who was said to hold passports belonging to missing people. Siemons named his source: Nadine Gires, a Frenchwoman who lived in the same building as the dealer. She told Knippenberg about the passports and said the Dutch couple had visited the dealer's home. Knippenberg went to the Thai police. On March 11, 1976, police raided the apartment, but Sobhraj produced a stolen passport bearing his own photograph, claimed to be an American and was released, CNN reported. McBeth writes that he and Leclerc were held for only a few hours and let go without explanation.
Gires later took passport photographs from the apartment, and Sobhraj and Leclerc left for Malaysia. Thai police showed little interest, and Knippenberg carried out most of a roughly five-month inquiry himself, with help from colleagues and from Gires. When he was allowed into the empty apartment, he found the personal belongings of victims, including Cornelia Hemker's coat and handbag, and a stock of about eight kilograms of medicines. McBeth reports that it included six bottles of anti-diarrhea medicine laced with rat poison. A front-page story in the Bangkok Post in May 1976 and an Interpol notice followed.
Knippenberg kept four boxes of photographs, witness statements and other papers. He later sent a 1976 statement by Leclerc to the FBI, and he believed it helped the Nepali police; McBeth writes that his files provided key evidence in the Bronzich case decades later. He described the case to McBeth as "like having malaria," something that came back every few years throughout his career. His then-wife, Angela Kane, worked on the evidence with him. Knippenberg was knighted by the Dutch king in 2022, Al Jazeera reported.
Sobhraj's last days of freedom in the 1970s came in India. AFP has reported that he was accused of poisoning a French tourist, Luc Salomon, in a hotel in Bombay (now Mumbai); one AFP account in 2003 placed that death in a New Delhi hotel instead. On July 5, 1976, in a New Delhi hotel, a group of French tourists collapsed after being drugged, and Sobhraj was arrested. The size of the group varies by account: more than 20 tourists (AFP), a party of 22 (McBeth), more than 30 engineering students (Press Trust of India), or 60 tourists (Los Angeles Times, 1997). The Times reported that they had been given capsules containing crushed sleeping pills and laxatives, which he said were antibacterial drugs. No one in the group died. A Thai police officer, Sompol Suthimai, whose work through Interpol helped bring about the arrest, later pushed for Sobhraj's extradition to Thailand, AFP has reported.
Leclerc was arrested with him. In August 1976, McBeth writes, she and Sobhraj had read an Asiaweek cover story about the case while driving through Rawalpindi, in Pakistan, and had been surprised at how much the police knew. Ajay Chowdhury was not arrested with them. He has never been found. He was last seen on August 28, 1977, by a German friend in Grafenhausen, a town near the French-German border, McBeth reports.
Reliable outlets describe the outcome differently. AFP reported in 2007 that Indian authorities convicted him of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and other charges, and in 2011 that he had served a 21-year sentence in India for culpable homicide. CNN reported that he was sentenced to 12 years in Tihar prison for trying to rob the French tour group and that convictions for two other killings were overturned on appeal. McBeth also gives a 12-year sentence. The South China Morning Post has written that he was convicted of drugging and robbing a group of French students and of killing a French tourist. The Associated Press, by contrast, has said he was convicted of theft and acquitted of murdering two tourists, and his French lawyer said in 1997 that he had served a two-year term for the poisoning.
One Indian outcome is clear. In May 1982 an Indian court sentenced him to life imprisonment for the 1976 murder of an Israeli tourist, Alan Jacob. A year later an appeal court acquitted him for lack of evidence, and he stayed in prison on his other sentences, AFP reported.
Sobhraj served his Indian sentences in Tihar, India's largest prison, in New Delhi. Sunil Gupta, who began work at Tihar at 24 on May 8, 1981, and later co-wrote Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer, told the South China Morning Post that Sobhraj won other prisoners' help by drafting their legal petitions. A 1981 report by the People's Union for Civil Liberties, as summarized by the Post, said he ran a business in narcotics and liquor inside the prison. He also smuggled in a knife, crockery, an electric heater and a voice recorder, which the Post says he used to blackmail corrupt officials.
In late 1985 India agreed to Thailand's request to extradite him over the murders of Teresa Knowlton and a Turkish tourist, AFP has reported. In Thailand he faced the possibility of a death sentence. In March 1986, about two years before he was due to be released, according to McBeth, he escaped from Tihar. CNN gives the date as March 17, 1986. He drugged the guards with sweets laced with sleeping pills, offered on the pretext of celebrating his birthday; the Associated Press described the vehicle as a birthday cake. The Post reports that six other prisoners escaped with him.
He was free for about three weeks. On the evening of Sunday, April 6, 1986, a Mumbai police team led by Inspector Madhukar Zende arrested him at the O'Coqueiro, a restaurant in Porvorim, near Panaji in Goa, Outlook India and The Navhind Times have reported. "I walked up to their table and said 'you are Charles'," Zende told Reuters. Camil Parkhe, then a crime reporter at The Navhind Times, recalled that a reader telephoned him about unusual police activity near Porvorim, that the police control room first told him all was well, and that a second caller said the police had caught a big fish. Sobhraj was driven to Mumbai in a convoy of private taxis. The Navhind Times ran the story across eight columns the next day.
He was returned to Tihar and, according to McBeth, given another 10 years for the escape. Delays in the Indian courts meant the escape case took years to come to trial, and by then, AFP has reported, the Thai authorities had lost interest in extradition. In December 2022 Zende, a former Mumbai police officer, told the Press Trust of India that Sobhraj was dangerous and should not be freed.
Sobhraj left Tihar for the last time in early 1997 and was sent to France. He flew from New Delhi to Paris on April 8, 1997, the Los Angeles Times reported, with police guarding the aircraft's walkways. A judge in Bobigny, north of Paris, questioned him about the 1976 drugging of the French tourists and opened an inquiry, but he was allowed to leave. His lawyer, Jacques Vergès, said the Indian prison term for the poisoning meant that "the affair is closed."
He settled in Paris and gave interviews for money. In 1997 he said he expected 15 million dollars for the film rights to an autobiography he planned to write, and a French actor and producer, Yves Renier, who had met him in a New Delhi courtroom, wanted to make the film. The Los Angeles Times reported that he had told Australian writers he committed 10 murders for which he was wanted in four countries, and quoted him: "I can justify the murders to myself." Asked in India whether he would commit more crimes, he answered: "Never. That is a part of my life that I have forgotten." CNN later reported that no film was made.
By the time India released him, Thailand could no longer try him. McBeth writes that the Thai arrest warrant had expired before his 1997 release; AFP says his alleged crimes in Thailand had passed the statute of limitations. Sources differ on when the case lapsed: the South China Morning Post says the related charges expired in 1995, and the Associated Press says the Thai case expired in 1996. In 2022 Sompol Suthimai, the Thai officer who had pushed for his extradition, told AFP at 90 that he did not object to Sobhraj's release because he "has already paid for his actions."
Sobhraj lived quietly in France for about six years. In 2003 he traveled to Nepal, where the 1975 murder cases had never been closed. McBeth writes that no one knows why he went back; Knippenberg suspected he wanted attention. The South China Morning Post reported that he believed the 1975 warrants had lapsed. He told AFP in 2007 that he had been researching a television documentary. AFP has reported that he was setting up a business exporting shawls under a false identity.
Joseph Nathan, a journalist at The Himalayan Times, traced him to a hotel in Thamel, Kathmandu's tourist district, and the paper published a front-page story on September 17, 2003, under the headline "The Serpent living incognito in Thamel." Police arrested him at a casino. The Himalayan Times places the casino in Thamel; McBeth and AFP describe it as the casino at the Yak and Yeti Hotel, where, AFP says, he was playing baccarat. Nathan called the arrest "karma." S Ramesh, a counselor at the Indian embassy, told the South China Morning Post that he recognized Sobhraj by his nose. The Himalayan Times and McBeth give the date of the arrest as September 19, 2003; the UN Human Rights Committee's record of his case gives September 13. McBeth notes that it was the day Knippenberg retired.
Sobhraj told the UN committee that he had a valid visa issued by Nepal's consulate in Paris and that he was held for 25 days without a lawyer. He was accused first of holding false documents and then of the 1975 murder.
Finding the old files took months. In May 2004 the Bhaktapur court and district police told the Kathmandu District Court that they could not locate a 1975 case file. "Though the record shows that a case was registered in 1975, we cannot locate the file," a Bhaktapur court letter said, and Judge Om Prakash Mishra said the case could not be set down for a final hearing without it. The officer who led the original investigation, Bishwalal Shrestha, said in 2007 that police records of the Carrière case had been lost over the past 20 years. In May 2005 The Himalayan Times reported that documents from the 1975 case had been found at the Kathmandu District Court and sent to Bhaktapur.
The prosecution of the Bronzich murder went ahead. A police signature expert, Udayajung Bahadur Rana, told the court that signatures made in 1975 in the name of Henricus Bintanja matched Sobhraj's signature. The conviction rested largely on handwriting experts who matched his signature to 1975 hotel registration slips, AFP reported in 2007. Two witnesses identified him in court: Chandra Bir Rai, a retired police officer of 79 who testified that he had seen him in Nepal in 1975, and Purna Bahadur Maharajan, a driver hired in 1975 by the man police believed was Sobhraj. The court also treated his method of operating as evidence, which The Himalayan Times reported was the first time this had been done in Nepal.
On August 12, 2004, the Kathmandu District Court found him guilty of the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In Nepal a life sentence means 20 years. Sobhraj said the photocopied hotel slips were forgeries and asked for the originals, which were not produced. One of his five lawyers, Raja Ram Dhakal, argued that photographs and photocopies could be fabricated and that the chain of circumstantial evidence was incomplete. Sobhraj himself said he had been convicted on modus operandi alone, without proof that the murder had been established.
After the 2004 verdict, Bronzich's father, then almost 85, wrote to the police officer Ganesh KC to say he was relieved that Sobhraj was behind bars, Al Jazeera reported.
The Patan Appellate Court heard his appeal in 2005. On July 14, 2005, according to the UN Human Rights Committee's account, the judges hearing it declined to adopt the first-instance judgment; on August 4, 2005, a different panel upheld it. He appealed to the Supreme Court in 2006.
The Supreme Court appeal lasted more than four years. There were 41 hearings between March 26, 2006, and April 23, 2010, the UN committee recorded. On January 13, 2009, the court sent one question back to the Appellate Court: whether he had entered Nepal illegally in 1975. A bench of Justices Min Bahadur Rayamajhi and Kalyan Shrestha was hearing the case at that time, The Himalayan Times reported. On June 4, 2009, by the committee's account, the Appellate Court sentenced him to one year in prison and a fine of 2,000 rupees on that charge, a term he said he had already served on remand. The Appellate Court found that he had entered Nepal in 1975 on a passport in the name of Henirus (Henricus) Bintanja, and that he had been in Nepal that year although he denied it. By July 2010 a Supreme Court bench of Justices Ram Kumar Prasad Shah and Gauri Dhakal had postponed its verdict three times; Sobhraj, then 66, missed the July 14 hearing, citing his health. On July 30, 2010, the Supreme Court upheld the life sentence for the Bronzich murder.
In December 2011 the Supreme Court declined to review that decision. "The court didn't accept the petition, saying there was no need to go against the verdict," said court spokesman Hemant Rawal. His lawyer, Shakuntala Thapa, said she would seek clemency from President Ram Baran Yadav.
In November 2008 his lawyer filed a complaint with the UN Human Rights Committee, which monitors the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In views adopted on July 27, 2010, three days before Nepal's Supreme Court ruled, the committee found that Nepal had violated his rights under the covenant. It found that he had not been given an interpreter or early access to a lawyer; that the courts had shifted the burden of proof onto him, when "a criminal court may convict a person only when there is no reasonable doubt of his or her guilt"; that the Supreme Court proceedings had been unreasonably delayed; and that the conditions of his detention did not respect his dignity. It also found violations of the rules against retroactive criminal law and double jeopardy, because he had been required to prove that he had not entered Nepal in 1975, which was not a criminal offense at the time. It said there was not enough evidence to find that he had been tortured. The committee asked Nepal to provide an effective remedy, including a speedy end to the proceedings and compensation.
Nepal rejected the complaint. In early 2011 the government told the committee that its courts' independence and impartiality could not be questioned and that the Supreme Court verdict and the police handling of the case had followed national law, the Press Trust of India reported.
The Carrière murder case was registered at the Bhaktapur District Court. In 2007 The Himalayan Times reported that it had been pending there for 32 years. "We cannot prosecute anyone twice on the same charge," said Upendra Kanta Aryal, a senior superintendent of police, explaining that the second case would proceed on its own. The case remained pending through 2010.
In 2014 a Nepali court convicted Sobhraj of the murder of Laurent Carrière. CNN and The Himalayan Times report that he was sentenced to 20 years; the Press Trust of India describes it as a second life sentence. The Kathmandu Post reported in 2022 that he was serving two concurrent 20-year sentences for the two murders. An amended arrest order from the Bhaktapur District Court dated March 22, 2018, said he was to remain in prison until September 18, 2023, The Himalayan Times reported.
Sobhraj spent his Nepali sentence at the Central Jail in Kathmandu. In 2008 he married Nihita Biswas in a ceremony in the jail. She had worked as his interpreter and was the daughter of his lawyer, Shakuntala Thapa. Reuters describes her as 44 years his junior; The Kathmandu Post put the gap at 46 years. A prison official told the South China Morning Post that he spent his time reading newspapers and watching television, and the jailer Ishwari Prasad Pandey told The Kathmandu Post that he "spoke less and spent most of his time reading and writing."
In June 2017, at 73, he had open-heart surgery at the Shahid Ganga Lal Hospital in Kathmandu, which doctors said was successful, the Associated Press reported. A doctor who treated him in Nepal, Raamesh Koirala, later wrote about him in a book, the Press Trust of India has reported.
Sobhraj petitioned for his release on a writ of habeas corpus. He argued that he was over 70, had a heart condition, and qualified for the sentence remission available to older prisoners. On December 21, 2022, a division bench of the Supreme Court of Nepal, Justices Sapana Pradhan Malla and Til Prasad Shrestha, ordered the government to release him, The Himalayan Times reported.
Under Nepal's prison regulations, prisoners over 65 may have up to 75 percent of their sentence waived for good conduct, or if they are bedridden with an incurable illness, and the court held that these rules apply to foreigners too. The jail administration had argued that the Senior Citizens Act covered only Nepali citizens. The Central Jail had twice recommended a reduction of his sentence and reported no misconduct, and the court said he could not be treated as a prisoner without good conduct. It also found that a Patan High Court order that he not be held in solitary confinement had not been carried out, and that refusing him these rights violated his right to life and his right not to be held in solitary confinement. The court noted that he had already served 95 percent of his 20-year sentence. It ordered that he be sent back to his own country within 15 days unless he was needed for another case. A court spokesman, Bimal Paudel, told CNN the ruling was based on his age and health.
He was released at 12:20 p.m. on Friday, December 23, 2022, after 19 years, three months and seven days in prison, The Kathmandu Post reported. The release had been expected a day earlier but was delayed by pre-release procedures, including a health check. Under heavy police escort he was taken to the Department of Immigration, where the French embassy had prepared his travel documents, and then to the airport. He left Kathmandu that evening on a Qatar Airways flight to Doha, bound for Paris. "The Home Ministry has banned Sobhraj from entering Nepal for 10 years," said the ministry's spokesman, Fanindra Mani Pokharel. Nihita Biswas said: "It's been a long legal battle, a long journey for justice."
On the flight he told an AFP reporter: "I feel great... I have a lot to do. I have to sue a lot of people. Including the state of Nepal." He said the Nepali judges had been biased against him and the cases were built on fake documents. He landed at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris early on Saturday, December 24. Border police took him aside for identity checks; an airport source told AFP that French authorities did not want him and that he was free to go once the checks were done. "I'm fine, I'm glad," he said, according to the Associated Press. His French lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, said she was "very happy but very shocked that it took 19 years to obtain his normal freedom," called the Nepal case "fabricated" and said he would contest it.
In February 2023 the French publisher L'Archipel brought out his memoir, Moi, le Serpent, co-written and edited by the French filmmaker Jean-Charles Deniau, who had escorted him from the airport. Deniau also made a 90-minute documentary with his cooperation, Sur la piste du Serpent. "Not all of what he says is true … a great part is fiction," Deniau told Al Jazeera.
In an interview with Al Jazeera in a Paris hotel, published in August 2023, Sobhraj, then 79, said: "I have never killed anybody in my life." He said he was basing himself in London while he negotiated film and television deals, that he planned to bring a case against Nepal before the UN Human Rights Committee, and that he intended to sue Netflix and the BBC for calling him a serial killer in their drama The Serpent. He also claimed that Knippenberg, whom he called "my opposite party," had paid officials and judges to keep him in prison. Angela Kane told Al Jazeera that families of victims wanted closure. In April 2021 she had received a letter from a man in Britain whose aunt died in Goa in the 1970s and who believed Sobhraj was responsible. "Crime should not pay," she said. Ganesh KC, the Nepali police official, called him "a master of lies and deception."
When Al Jazeera published that interview on August 25, 2023, he was free, had been interviewed in Paris and said he was based in London.
Marie-Andrée Leclerc was arrested with Sobhraj in New Delhi in July 1976. McBeth reports that both were sentenced to 12 years in prison, that she was released in 1984 on humanitarian grounds, and that she died of ovarian cancer in Canada at 38. The South China Morning Post gives the year of her death as 1984.
Ajay Chowdhury, the Indian associate, has never been found. McBeth reports that he was last seen in August 1977 in Grafenhausen, near the French-German border. No court has ruled on his part in any death.
Richard Neville and Julie Clarke interviewed Sobhraj for their book, published in 1979, which the Press Trust of India cites as The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj and the South China Morning Post as On the Trail of the Serpent; it calls him a "brilliant psychopath." The American writer Tommy Thompson's book Serpentine, which McBeth describes as partly fictionalized, gave its name to the BBC drama. The novelist Farrukh Dhondy, who met him in London, wrote the semifictional The Bikini Murders. In Nepal, Anantaraj Luitel and Bikash Bhattarai wrote Charles Shobhraj Aparadh Ra Sajaya, reviewed by The Himalayan Times in 2006. Sunil Gupta's Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer covers his years at Tihar.
The Hindi film Main Aur Charles (2015), with Randeep Hooda as Sobhraj, was reportedly based on his escape from Tihar. The Serpent, an eight-part drama made by the BBC and Netflix and released in April 2021, starred Tahar Rahim as Sobhraj, Jenna Coleman as Leclerc and Billy Howle as Knippenberg, who advised the production. McBeth, who covered the case in 1976, described it as inspired by true events and not always accurate; the producers built a replica of Kanit House in Bangkok. Coutant-Peyre called the series "garbage first of all" and said "70 per cent of it is totally false." Sidhant Gupta played him in Black Warrant (2025). Inspector Zende, a Netflix Hindi film released on September 5, 2025, written and directed by Chinmay Mandlekar, stars Manoj Bajpayee as Madhukar Zende and Jim Sarbh as a fugitive named Carl Bhojraj, who is Sobhraj in all but name, Scroll reported. A documentary on Zende, made in 2023, had not been released.
Proven by final judgment: the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich (Kathmandu District Court, 2004; upheld 2005 and 2010) and the murder of Laurent Carrière (2014). The UN Human Rights Committee found in 2010 that the Bronzich proceedings violated his fair-trial rights, and Nepal rejected that finding; the conviction was not overturned. Sobhraj denies both killings and denies having been in Nepal in 1975.
In India: a conviction or convictions arising from the 1976 drugging of French tourists in New Delhi, reported by different outlets as culpable homicide not amounting to murder, theft, or drugging and robbery; a murder conviction for the death of Alan Jacob, overturned on appeal in 1983; and the 1986 escape.
Attributed, never tried: the deaths in Thailand of Teresa Knowlton, Vitali Hakim, Henk Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker, and of a Turkish tourist named in the 1985 extradition request. The poisoning of Luc Salomon was alleged, but no conviction for it was reported. Totals of "more than 20," "at least 15 in 10 countries" and "more than 30, 12 confirmed" all come from police and press tallies, not court findings. His biographers say he admitted at least 12 killings between 1972 and 1976 and then retracted them.
Details that vary between sources: the date of his 2003 arrest (September 19 or September 13); the casino (in Thamel or at the Yak and Yeti Hotel); the number of French tourists drugged in 1976 (more than 20, 22, more than 30, 60); the length of his first Indian sentence (12 years or two years); the year the Thai case lapsed (1995, 1996 or by 1997); the age gap between him and Nihita Biswas (44 or 46 years); Knippenberg's age in 1976 (31 or 32); the year of the Carrière conviction (2014 in most reports; 2015 in the South China Morning Post); and whether Carrière's sentence was described as 20 years or life, which in Nepal amount to the same term.
April 6, 1944: born in Saigon to an Indian father and a Vietnamese mother.
1963: first jailed in Paris, for burglary.
1970: moves to India; arrested there in 1971 over a jewelry robbery, he flees on bail to Greece, is arrested and escapes.
1975: arrives in Bangkok with Marie-Andrée Leclerc and Ajay Chowdhury, posing as a gem dealer.
October 1975: Teresa Knowlton's body is found at Pattaya.
Late December 1975: Connie Jo Bronzich and Laurent Carrière are found dead two days apart in the Kathmandu Valley.
March 3, 1976: the Dutch couple's bodies are identified in Bangkok.
March 11, 1976: Thai police raid his apartment and let him go.
May 1976: the Bangkok Post publishes the story on its front page; an Interpol notice follows.
July 5, 1976: arrested in New Delhi after the drugging of a group of French tourists.
August 28, 1977: Ajay Chowdhury is last seen, in Grafenhausen.
May 1982: life sentence in India for the murder of Alan Jacob; acquitted on appeal in 1983.
1984: Leclerc is released on humanitarian grounds and dies in Canada.
Late 1985: India agrees to extradite him to Thailand.
March 1986: escapes from Tihar jail after drugging guards.
April 6, 1986: recaptured in Porvorim, Goa, by Madhukar Zende's team.
Early 1997: released from Tihar; flies to Paris on April 8, 1997.
September 17, 2003: The Himalayan Times reports that he is in Kathmandu.
September 2003: arrested in a Kathmandu casino.
August 12, 2004: convicted of the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich and sentenced to life.
August 4, 2005: the Patan Appellate Court upholds the conviction.
2008: marries Nihita Biswas in prison; complaint filed with the UN Human Rights Committee.
June 4, 2009: sentenced to one year and a fine for entering Nepal illegally in 1975.
July 27, 2010: the UN Human Rights Committee finds violations of his fair-trial rights.
July 30, 2010: the Supreme Court of Nepal upholds the Bronzich conviction.
December 2011: the Supreme Court refuses to review its decision.
2014: convicted of the murder of Laurent Carrière.
June 2017: open-heart surgery in Kathmandu.
April 2021: The Serpent is released.
December 21, 2022: the Supreme Court orders his release and deportation.
December 23, 2022: released and flown out of Nepal; barred from returning for 10 years.
December 24, 2022: arrives in Paris.
February 2023: Moi, le Serpent is published.
August 2023: tells Al Jazeera he never killed anybody and plans lawsuits.
September 5, 2025: Inspector Zende is released on Netflix.