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Sep 7 2006

Killing tourists: that seems to have been the favorite past time of Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj. But at the age of 60, justice appears to have caught up with Sobhraj in Kathmandu this week; he was sentenced to life in jail in Nepal for a double murder he is accused of committing in 1975.

The sentence may not mean much to Sobhraj (described as "Asia's premier serial killer" by one source). He has escaped from jails in a number of countries. He is supposed to have dug his way out of an Afghan prison with a spoon and escaped Greek custody by setting fire to the prison van he (along with other inmates) was in while locked inside. In 1971 he pretended to have appendicitis after an arrest in India for robbing a jewelry store; he was admitted to a hospital and escaped during one of the night time blackouts that was common during India's war with Banladesh.

We know a great deal about Sobhraj because he has been so willing to brag about his exploits in the past. Since his release from jail in India in 1997 it has been possible for a journalist or writer to simply pay a fee and meet Sobhraj at a Paris cafe for a chat and photos. The fee? About five thousand dollars....

Sobhraj was born in Saigon in 1944, the son of an Indian man from Bombay and a Vietnamese mother, named Noy (some sources refer to her as "Song"). His mother's second husband, a French military officer stationed in Saigon, Lieutenant Alphonse Darreau, later adopted Charles Sobhraj and he was eventually resettled with his mother in Marseille, France.

Early encounters with the law began before he was an adult. He twice ran away from his Paris boarding school and returned to Vietnam, reportedly paying for the trip through check fraud. Sobhraj spent three years for burglary and eight months for car theft in prison in France in the 1960's. In the 1970's Sobhraj became dabbling in drug smuggling. He also built up a small family of accomplices around himself. But Sobhraj was criminally flexible, however, and supported himself in part by befriending travelers, drugging them, robbing them, and then sometimes killing them. (Next: Thailand's "Bikini Murders" and Backpackers in Nepal...)