Javed Iqbal was convicted in Lahore of one hundred murders on physical evidence tied to only two of them. Raman Raghav confessed in Bombay to forty-one and was tried for two. Sararat Rangsiwuthaporn has been convicted of five killings out of fifteen cases that Thai police sent to prosecutors, and a Bangkok court is still working through the rest, one file at a time.
Serial cases in South and Southeast Asia rarely produce a clean count. A confession is one number, a charge sheet is another, and the sentence is a third. Which of them a court accepts depends on the country, and so does what follows: in India the appeals and mercy petitions ran for decades, in Vietnam the executions came within a year of the final appeal, and in Thailand the courts take the cases one at a time and have not yet finished. Nine prosecutions in six countries, taken country by country, show what police, judges and the press in each place could prove, and how long it took them.
In July and August 1968, people in the western suburbs of Bombay, some of the poorest in the city, were being killed at night. On August 27, 1968, Police Sub-Inspector Alex Fialho of the Dongri police station arrested a man in the Bhendi Bazaar area of south Bombay. Police records called him Sindhi Dalwai. The press called him Raman Raghav. He had a long record of theft and no fixed address. In November 1968 he confessed before a magistrate, and police later said he had admitted at least 41 killings between 1966 and 1968. No court ever tested that figure.
About ten cases were registered against him over the killings of July and August 1968, and charge sheets were filed in all of them. He was tried in one: the deaths of two men, Lalchand Jagannath Yadav and Dular Jaggi Yadav, at Chinchavli, Malad, on the night of August 25 to 26, 1968. The court held that the motive was theft of money kept at the stables where the two men worked. It rejected his claim of insanity on the strength of motive, preparation and flight. He pleaded guilty, the court heard the evidence anyway, and on August 13, 1969 he was convicted of murder under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code and sentenced to death.
What came next took eighteen years. In 1970 a special medical board reported him of unsound mind, and the Bombay High Court postponed confirmation of the sentence. The Supreme Court of India dismissed the State’s appeal on February 19, 1975. On August 4, 1987 the High Court confirmed the conviction, set aside the death sentence and imposed life imprisonment, citing a delay of nearly 19 years and his long illness. One of the judges noted that eight more trials still awaited him. He was held at Yeravda Central Prison in Pune and died in custody of kidney failure; Scroll.in gives April 7, 1988, while the Press Trust of India and The Week give 1995.
The court record on his earlier life is thin and mostly his own. He told the sessions court in 1969 that he was about 40 and came from Tirunelveli district in what is now Tamil Nadu; Scroll.in described a Tamil who reached Bombay in 1950 and worked as a mill hand. His confession described a reformatory school as a boy, repeated convictions for theft and about five years in prison in all. The judges who heard his case in 1987 disagreed with the psychiatrists about him: witnesses who met him before the Malad deaths saw nothing unusual and concluded he had acted like an ordinary criminal, while the doctors saw a long-standing mental illness. Ramakant Kulkarni, the senior officer who led the hunt, wrote in his memoir that the killings seemed to have no motive and that the violence was out of all proportion to the small gains involved. Almost none of the dead were ever named.
Shankar, also called Gauri Shankar, began as an auto-rickshaw driver, moved into illicit liquor and then ran a brothel at Thiruvanmiyur, on the southern edge of Madras, according to the prosecution case set out by the Supreme Court. In 1991 the Sessions Court at Chengalpattu convicted him of six murders committed between October 1987 and May 1988 and sentenced him to death, along with two of his associates, Eldin and Shivaji. The Supreme Court gives the sentence as May 31, 1991; Amnesty International gives May 30.
The dead were Lalitha, a woman who had lived with him; Sudalai, the associate she left him for; Ravi, Sudalai’s friend, who asked questions about his absence; and Sampath, Mohan and Govindaraj, three men from Mandhaveli who had clashed with his gang. The first death was on October 28, 1987 and the last on May 29, 1988. A claim that Shankar killed far more people circulated in the press, and no court judgment supports it.
The police response is part of the record. Ravi’s brother went to the Thiruvanmiyur police station on May 31, 1988, and the circle inspector sent him away, saying a constable had reported that no incident had taken place. Another station registered a missing-person case. On June 7 relatives went to a deputy superintendent. Shankar was arrested on June 27, 1988 and released on bail. Only after police picked up a gang member on July 6, who confessed and pointed out Shankar, did the Crime Branch of the Criminal Investigation Department take the case, on July 15. That gang member became the chief prosecution witness under a pardon. He testified that an inspector and a relative of the inspector had tried to shield the gang. The Supreme Court noted the allegations and made no findings on them, and no police officer was a defendant.
Shankar and Eldin had both made confessions before magistrates and later retracted them. The Supreme Court held the confessions true, voluntary and corroborated on material points. On the night of August 20, 1990 Shankar escaped from Madras Central Prison and was recaptured in Orissa on September 1. The Madras High Court confirmed the sentence on July 17, 1992, and the Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on April 4, 1994.
His name is attached to a second case. While under sentence of death he arranged for a Tamil magazine to publish his life story. Prison officials said he had not written it, and the magazine’s editor took the dispute to the Supreme Court. The judgment in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, delivered on October 7, 1994, set out a right to privacy under the Indian Constitution and held that the state could not stop the press from publishing in advance. A Madras High Court judgment of 2007 records that Shankar was later executed; Amnesty International lists the execution in 1995.
On June 28, 2001, a sessions court in Kolhapur sentenced two sisters, Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit, to death. The charges covered 13 kidnappings, one attempted kidnapping and nine murders between June 1990 and October 1996. The trial court held six murders proved; in 2004 the Bombay High Court ruled the evidence on one of them, the boy Swapnil, unsatisfactory, and left five: Santosh, Anjali, Shraddha, Gauri and Pankaj. The oldest was 4. The sisters were convicted of murder, with kidnapping offenses, under sections 302 and 364 of the Indian Penal Code read with the conspiracy provision, section 120B. The Supreme Court confirmed the sentences on August 31, 2006.
The prosecution’s case, accepted by the courts, was that the sisters, their mother Anjanabai Gavit and Renuka’s husband, a tailor identified in the judgment as K.S., lived by theft in crowded places, mostly by snatching gold chains at festivals. The Supreme Court traced the method to one incident in 1990, when Renuka was caught at a temple and let go only because she had a child with her. After that the group kept small children with it as cover and, the courts held, killed them once they were no longer useful. The children were taken from bus stands, railway stations, temples and markets in Kolhapur, Thane, Kalyan, Mumbai and Nashik. K.S. gave evidence for the prosecution under a pardon. Anjanabai died in custody before she could be tried.
Not everything alleged was proved. A boy named Guddu, taken in Mumbai in 1993, was the subject of a kidnapping conviction and a murder acquittal. Other deaths alleged by the prosecution were never proved as killings by either sister. The totals in the press ran higher than anything a court accepted: Outlook said at least a dozen children had been killed, and India Legal said the three women were charged with ten. The figures fixed by the courts are 13 kidnappings charged, nine murders alleged, six proved at trial and five upheld.
The years after the sentence made the case better known than the crimes. The Governor of Maharashtra rejected the mercy petitions in 2012 or 2013, depending on the record, and President Pranab Mukherjee rejected them on July 7, 2014. News reports said the sisters would be the first women hanged in independent India, and the Bombay High Court stayed the execution in August 2014. On January 18, 2022, two judges held that state officials had caused a delay of seven years, ten months and 15 days in deciding the petitions and commuted the sentences to life. On April 13, 2023 the Supreme Court let the commutation stand but ordered that each sister serve life for the rest of her natural life, without remission. A further writ petition from 2024 was pending in the Bombay High Court as of July 21, 2026.
Charles Sobhraj was arrested in a Kathmandu casino in September 2003, days after The Himalayan Times reported he was living in the city’s tourist district. He was 59, a French citizen born in Saigon, who had spent more than 20 years in Indian prisons and had lived in Paris since 1997. Nepali police charged him with two deaths of December 1975: Connie Jo Bronzich, a 29-year-old American from Santa Cruz, California, and Laurent Carriere, a 26-year-old Canadian. He said he had never been in Nepal before 2003. A Kathmandu court convicted him of the Bronzich murder on August 12, 2004; the Patan Appellate Court upheld that on August 4, 2005 and the Supreme Court on July 30, 2010, and a review was refused in December 2011. A second Nepali court convicted him of the Carriere murder in 2014. Each carried life imprisonment, which Nepali law counts as 20 years.
Those are the only murder convictions that stand against him. In India he was convicted of offenses arising from the July 1976 incident in a New Delhi hotel involving a group of French tourists, which AFP reported as culpable homicide not amounting to murder, and in May 1982 he was sentenced to life for the murder of an Israeli tourist, Alan Jacob, a conviction quashed on appeal in 1983 for lack of evidence. A further ten years followed his 1986 escape from Tihar jail, according to Asia Times. Mumbai police recaptured him in Goa on April 6, 1986. He was released in early 1997 and arrived in Paris on April 8.
The deaths in Thailand in 1975 were never tried. Thai police attributed to him the deaths of Teresa Knowlton, an American, Vitali Hakim, and a Dutch couple, Henk Bintanja, 29, and Cornelia Hemker, 25. India agreed in 1985 to extradite him to Thailand over the deaths of Knowlton and a Turkish tourist, but the Thai case lapsed. His biographers say he admitted at least 12 killings between 1972 and 1976 and later withdrew the admissions. He has denied all of them since.
The case against him in Thailand was built less by Thai police than by a junior Dutch diplomat, Herman Knippenberg, who received a letter in early 1976 from the family of Cornelia Hemker, who had heard nothing from the couple for six weeks. On March 3, 1976, a Dutch dentist compared records at the Bangkok police morgue and identified the couple. A colleague at the Belgian embassy passed on word of a French gem dealer calling himself Alain Gautier, one of Sobhraj’s aliases, said to hold passports belonging to missing travelers. Thai police raided the dealer’s apartment on March 11, 1976, but Sobhraj showed a stolen passport with his own photograph and was released within hours. Knippenberg carried out most of a roughly five-month inquiry himself. A Bangkok Post story in May 1976 and an Interpol notice followed.
On December 21, 2022, the Supreme Court of Nepal ordered him freed on a habeas corpus petition, applying the 75 percent sentence remission available to prisoners over 65. He was released on December 23 after 19 years, three months and seven days, deported to France that evening and barred from Nepal for ten years. In August 2023 he gave an interview in Paris, said he was based in London and announced plans for lawsuits.
In the last days of November 1999, a letter reached the police in Lahore. Its writer, Javed Iqbal, said he had killed 100 boys. Time magazine quoted it a few weeks later: "I have killed 100 children, all boys." Parcels with a written confession and photographs of boys went to the authorities and to the Urdu daily Jang, whose editor, Jamil Chishti, told TRT World he had weighed two possibilities, that someone was framing Iqbal or that the confession was real. Jang published on December 3, 1999, with photographs of 57 boys. The official record starts a day earlier: on December 2 police registered a first information report, No. 316 of 1999, at Lahore.
Parents came to the police station to look through clothing and photographs, and the families of most of the 100 boys named in Iqbal’s records identified belongings. Physical evidence of only two victims was ever recovered, as the Associated Press, CBS News and Dawn all reported. TRT World reported that no DNA testing was done; Pakistan’s first DNA laboratory did not open until 2006. Iqbal himself dropped out of sight and the hunt became one of the largest in Pakistan’s history. On December 30, 1999 he surrendered at the Lahore office of Jang, saying he feared for his life if he went to the police.
He denied everything at trial. On March 16, 2000, Additional Sessions Judge Allah Bakhsh Ranjha convicted him on 100 counts of murder and 100 counts of causing disappearance of evidence and sentenced him to death. The judge added a direction about how the sentence was to be carried out that the government said it would challenge and that the Council of Islamic Ideology said violated Islam. It was never carried out. On October 9, 2001, with his appeal still waiting to be heard, Iqbal and a co-accused died in neighboring cells in Kot Lakhpat jail. Officials called it suicide; mortuary doctors reported signs that contradicted that. Because he died with the appeal pending, no appeals court ever ruled on his guilt, and the Federal Shariat Court recorded his appeal as infructuous in April 2007, when Dawn reported that the court had acquitted two men in the case.
Even the basic facts of his life are disputed. Time gave his age in December 1999 as 42, ARY News as 41, and Dawn said he was 40 when he died in 2001. Britannica gives his birth year only as "1961?". TRT World, drawing on relatives and neighbors, described a large Lahore family, a metal workshop, a video-game arcade staffed by young runaways and a small magazine called Anti-Corruption. Britannica records complaints against him in 1985 and 1990 that never led to a conviction. Iqbal’s own account, in the letter and in his diary, was revenge against the police, who he said had beaten him after a wrongful arrest. Courts never tested that account, and the only judgment against him is a trial conviction that he died too soon to appeal.
Somkid Phumphuang was convicted of killing five women in five Thai provinces between January and June 2005: Warunee Phimphabut in Mukdahan, Pongpan Sapchai in Lampang, Patcharee Amatanirand in Trang, Porntawan Pangkhabut in Udon Thani and Sompong Phimphonphirom in Buri Ram. Each killing was prosecuted as its own case before the Criminal Court in Bangkok, and every case ended in life imprisonment. Two death sentences were reduced to life, one on appeal on March 2, 2010 and one at trial because he had confessed.
Linking the cases took a series of provincial inquiries. Pairoj Thaiputsa, then an investigator at the Mukdahan station, told Thairath in 2019 that Somkid’s name was in the guest register in his case. Police in Lampang shared information about a second case, and a third followed. The officers suspected one man but could not confirm it until the Udon Thani case, where camera footage tied the cases together and the Crime Suppression Division took over. Somkid was arrested in Chaiyaphum province on June 29, 2005. He contested one case, in Trang, arguing that the evidence did not identify him; the Appeals Court, in a ruling read on July 31, 2013, relied on witness identification and forensic evidence, rejected his plea for a lighter sentence because he had shown no remorse, and let the life term stand. With that ruling all five cases had been decided. He was 50.
He left Nong Khai Provincial Prison in May 2019, after about 14 years, under Thailand’s system of sentence reductions for good conduct. In December 2019 a 51-year-old woman, Ratsami Mulichan, died in Kranuan district, Khon Kaen province, on December 15; he had lived with her for less than two weeks. He was arrested on December 18, 2019 at Pak Chong station in Nakhon Ratchasima province, after two passengers on a train recognized him from police photographs. In March 2021 the Khon Kaen Provincial Court sentenced him to death for premeditated murder, with theft and concealment of a body. The sentence has not been reported through the appeal courts, and the date of the ruling differs between reports.
The second case did more than the first. His release set off a national argument about early release, and Thailand’s prime minister ordered a review of the sentence-reduction system. Born in Thung Song district of Nakhon Si Thammarat province, he was remembered by his aunt, then 86, as a quiet, polite boy who left his village at about 20. A police colonel who investigated the first of the 2005 killings described him as talkative, polite and well spoken. His own son told reporters in 2019 that he had seen his father once, at his birth.
Siriporn Khanwong, a 32-year-old businesswoman from Kanchanaburi province who led a rotating savings group, died in Ratchaburi province, west of Bangkok, on April 14, 2023. Her friend Sararat Rangsiwuthaporn, then 36 and known by the nickname Am, was arrested in Bangkok on April 25, 2023 on a warrant for premeditated murder. Within days relatives of other people who had died suddenly came forward, most of them from Ratchaburi, Kanchanaburi and Nakhon Pathom.
The police count rose quickly: eleven suspicious deaths on April 26, thirteen the next day, fourteen by April 29. On June 30, 2023, the Deputy National Police Commissioner, Police General Surachate Hakparn, presented the completed investigation: more than 900 witnesses interviewed, about 26,500 pages of documents, fifteen cases in eight provinces from 2015 to 2023, fourteen deaths and one woman who survived, and more than 75 charges. Every case was linked to her through moneylending, used-car deals or rotating savings groups, the informal circles in which members pay in monthly and take turns collecting the pot. Several of the dead were police officers or officers' wives. Surachate said about 78 million baht had passed through accounts linked to her and that gambling may have been a factor; the court later held that she had debts of several million baht linked to online gambling.
The prosecutions have moved through the Criminal Court in Bangkok one case at a time. On November 20, 2024 she was convicted of the murder of Siriporn Khanwong and sentenced to death. On February 20, 2026 she was convicted of the murder of Police Lieutenant Colonel Nipa Saenchan and sentenced to death, reduced to life imprisonment; on April 30, 2026 the same happened in the case of Police Captain Sukanda Wimolman. She was acquitted on March 11, 2026 in the case of Nittaya Kaewbuppha, on July 21 in the case of Rosjarin Nilnoi and on August 4 in the case of Monthathip Khao-in, each time on evidence the court called insufficient. On August 25 she was sentenced to death for the murder of Darinee Thepthawee, and on September 22, 2026 to death for the murder of Chantharat Wongkraisin.
As of September 22, 2026, the court had ruled in eight of the fifteen cases: five convictions, with three death sentences and two life sentences, and three acquittals. Judgment in the attempted murder case was set for November 25, 2026. All rulings are open to appeal, her lawyers say she will appeal, and she maintains her innocence. She is held at the Central Women’s Correctional Institution in Bangkok. Her former husband, a police lieutenant colonel, was dismissed and charged with receiving stolen property and forgery over the sale of a car belonging to a man who died in March 2023; a court released him on bail, saying police had produced no evidence linking him to the deaths.
On September 1, 2004, the Binh Duong Provincial People’s Court sentenced Le Thanh Van to death for poisoning thirteen people between January 1998 and August 2001 and taking what they owned. She was convicted of murder, robbery and illegal possession of poison. Tuoi Tre called her the first woman in Vietnam to kill in series, and Ngoi Sao, a VnExpress publication, wrote that no defendant in the country had been prosecuted for as many as thirteen deaths. Nearly all the victims knew her: an elderly woman whose family had hired her, a landlord, the mother of the man she lived with, her brother-in-law, a bus owner who treated her as an adopted daughter, and an old friend.
Born in Saigon on December 5, 1956, Van had a criminal record by the end of the 1970s. District 10 police arrested her in December 1979 for posing as an army captain, she served 18 months from 1990 for forgery and fraud, and in 1993 a court gave her four years for fraud. By the late 1990s she was telling people she was a dentist trained in Germany who spoke seven languages. She had some dental knowledge, Tuoi Tre reported, enough to make the story believable. Prosecutors described a pattern: win trust, then produce forged papers of debt or sale, and claim money, motorbikes, land or businesses. Doctors recorded the deaths as illnesses.
The first case at trial was that of Vo Thi Ly, 81, in Long Khanh on January 3, 1998; Van lived with the family’s worker, Diu Danh Quang, born in 1973. Ho Thi Mong Dao died in 1999, and Van produced a photocopied IOU with a forged signature for the motorbike she kept. Nguyen Thanh Son died in April 2000. Tran Thi Xinh, who owned a passenger bus, and her driver Nguyen Van Dong died in June and July 2000. Investigators also attributed eight more poisoning cases to her, involving sixteen people, three of whom died; she was never charged in them. The deaths of her two husbands, in 1989 and 1992, were suspected and never charged.
The police failure came in the middle of the series. Binh Duong provincial police arrested her on July 7, 2000. She was held for six months and released on bail from January 15, 2001 for lack of evidence, and four more people died before she was arrested again on October 15, 2001. Quang was convicted of murder and robbery and received 21 years, reduced on appeal to 17. The appeal of Van was rejected on February 2, 2005, clemency was refused on October 4, 2005, and she was executed by firing squad at Thu Dau Mot on the morning of October 26, 2005.
Baekuni sold snacks, drinks and cigarettes from a cart in East Jakarta. The children who worked around the bus terminal at Pulogadung called him "Babe", an affectionate word for Dad, and neighbors told The Jakarta Post he was friendly, especially with children. In January 2010, after the death of a nine-year-old boy named Ardiansyah came to light in East Jakarta, police arrested him there on January 9, on information from the boy’s parents. He then told investigators he had killed 14 boys since the 1990s.
The numbers moved from the first day. Police told the Associated Press that the boys were aged six to twelve and the period 1995 to January 8, 2010; another police account said 1997; the prosecution case reported by JPNN and a 2022 detikX retrospective said 1993. Police counted ten victims, with two more admitted. The National Commission for Child Protection, an independent body, put the toll at no fewer than 15, and its chairman told the AP: "This is the tip of an iceberg." The boys named in reports were Ardiansyah, Adi, Rio and Arif. The convictions themselves are described differently: The Jakarta Post reported four boys, killed from 2007 to January 2010, while Liputan6 reported in 2013 that the Supreme Court upheld findings covering 14.
The East Jakarta District Court convicted him of premeditated murder under Article 340 of the Criminal Code, with other charges, and sentenced him to life on October 6, 2010. The Jakarta High Court raised the sentence to death on December 13, 2010, and the Supreme Court rejected his cassation appeal on April 21, 2011, a decision announced publicly on May 2, 2013. A judicial review was rejected. In March 2019 detikNews noted that he had not been executed, and in September 2022 detikX described him as held at Cipinang prison awaiting execution.
The case was tied almost at once to an older one. Siswanto, known as Robot Gedek, was sentenced to death in the 1990s for the deaths of boys who lived and worked outdoors in Jakarta; the AP said 12. He died of a heart attack on March 26, 2007 in a prison on Nusakambangan island before any execution. His former lawyer said in February 2010 that Baekuni had testified against Robot Gedek in 1997 under the name Sunarto and had been the only witness against him, and argued the testimony could be new evidence. Jakarta police rejected the link, and Baekuni’s lawyers denied he had testified. The question was never settled.
The same arithmetic recurs. Raman Raghav: 41 confessed, two tried. Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit: nine alleged, five upheld. Javed Iqbal: 100 convicted, physical evidence tied to two. Baekuni: 14 confessed, a conviction described as covering four in one report and fourteen in another. In every one of these cases, the figure that the public remembers is the one a court never had to test.
The institutions differ more than the crimes do. Indian courts handled Raman Raghav and the Gavit sisters over decades, with mental illness and delayed mercy petitions doing the work that guilt had done in the first trial. Thai courts try each death on its own file, which is why Somkid Phumphuang was released after serving about 14 years on five life terms and why Sararat Rangsiwuthaporn’s trial is still unfinished after three years. Vietnamese courts moved from first trial to execution in thirteen months. A Pakistani court passed 100 convictions in a few months and the accused was dead before an appeal court heard him. Where police acted late, others had already named the dead: a Dutch embassy official in Bangkok, a Lahore newspaper, a brother in Madras who went to the station twice.
• October 1975 to July 1976: deaths in Thailand and Nepal attributed to or charged against Charles Sobhraj.
• March 3 and 11, 1976: Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg’s inquiry reaches the Bangkok police morgue; police raid an apartment in Bangkok.
• 1982 and 1983: Sobhraj sentenced to life in India in the Alan Jacob case, then the conviction is quashed.
• April 6, 1986: Sobhraj recaptured in Goa; early 1997: released, and arrives in Paris on April 8.
• 1966 to 1968: period of the killings Raman Raghav later confessed to, by police account.
• August 27, 1968: Raman Raghav arrested in Bombay.
• August 13, 1969: Raman Raghav convicted of murder at Malad and sentenced to death.
• August 4, 1987: Bombay High Court replaces his death sentence with life imprisonment.
• October 28, 1987 to May 29, 1988: the six deaths for which Auto Shankar was convicted.
• June 1990 to October 1996: period covered by the charges against Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit.
• 1991: Auto Shankar sentenced to death at Chengalpattu.
• April 4, 1994: Supreme Court of India dismisses Auto Shankar’s appeal.
• October 7, 1994: R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu decided.
• January 3, 1998: first death in the Le Thanh Van case, in Long Khanh.
• 1999: period of the killings in Javed Iqbal’s records; December 2: first information report No. 316 registered in Lahore; December 30: Iqbal surrenders at a newspaper office.
• March 16, 2000: Iqbal convicted on 100 counts of murder.
• July 7, 2000: Le Thanh Van arrested; released on bail January 15, 2001; arrested again October 15, 2001.
• June 28, 2001: Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit sentenced to death at Kolhapur.
• October 9, 2001: Iqbal dies in Kot Lakhpat jail.
• September 2003: Sobhraj arrested in Kathmandu; August 12, 2004: convicted of the Bronzich murder.
• September 1, 2004: Le Thanh Van sentenced to death; October 26, 2005: executed.
• June 29, 2005: Somkid Phumphuang arrested in Chaiyaphum province.
• August 31, 2006: Supreme Court of India confirms the death sentences of the Gavit sisters.
• July 31, 2013: Thai Appeals Court rules in the last of the five 2005 cases.
• July 7, 2014: President of India rejects the sisters' mercy petitions.
• January 9, 2010: Baekuni arrested in East Jakarta; October 6 and December 13, 2010: life sentence, then death sentence; April 21, 2011: cassation rejected.
• May 2019: Somkid Phumphuang released; December 18, 2019: arrested at Pak Chong; March 2021: sentenced to death at Khon Kaen.
• January 18, 2022 and April 13, 2023: the sisters' death sentences commuted; life without remission.
• December 21 to 23, 2022: Nepal’s Supreme Court orders Sobhraj freed; he is deported to France.
• April 14 and 25, 2023: Siriporn Khanwong dies; Sararat Rangsiwuthaporn arrested.
• November 20, 2024 to September 22, 2026: five first-instance convictions and three acquittals of Sararat Rangsiwuthaporn.
• November 25, 2026: judgment due in the attempted murder case against her.