Currently aged 78, Charles Sobhraj aka The Serpent landed in Paris’s main international airport in December 2022. He is a French citizen, although his father was Indian and his mother was Vietnamese. The serial killer committed several murderers in the 70s and mainly operated on the Hippie trail. Apart from being called The Serpent, he was even known as Bikini Killer and Splitting Killer.
According to The Guardian, convicted Serial Killer Charles Sobhraj has been released from prison after 19 years. From 2003 to 2022 he was held in a high-security prison in Nepal. The country’s supreme court ordered his release because of his increasing age and health concerns.
What did Charles Sobhraj do?
During the 1970s, Charles Sobhraj took the lives of at least 20 tourists in South and Southeast Asia, among which 14 of the murders occurred in Thailand. The reason he was able to lure victims was due to his ability to speak several languages, strong body language, and unmatched confidence and charisma.
According to India Today, he poised as a gemstone dealer and targeted wealthy Western tourists in Asia. Most of his victims were females. Since he radiated charm and confidence, he would easily become friends with several backpackers. He then proceeded to drug and rob them. He furthermore would get rid of the bodies of his victims by burning them. It would be very hard to recognize the identity of the charred corpses.
When the bodies of six women were discovered on a beach in Pattaya, Thailand, an arrest warrant was issued against him. Since the bodies of these women were clad in bikinis, from this point onward he was known as the “Bikini Killer”.
Charles Sobhraj was caught and arrested in a casino in Nepal in 2003. He was furthermore sentenced to life imprisonment, but released in December 2022 at the age of 78.
