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‘Bikini killer’ whose victims include Canadian to remain in Nepalese jail

‘Bikini killer’ whose victims include Canadian to remain in Nepalese jail

A 70-year-old alleged serial killer will likely spend the rest of his days behind bars for the 1975 murder of Canadian Laurent Carrière after a Nepalese court rejected his appeal.

Charles Sobhraj was already serving a life sentence for murdering Carrière’s American friend, Connie Jo Bronzich.

Sobhraj, a French national born in Saigon to a Vietnamese mother and Indian father, is an infamous international criminal who has been in and out of prison for decades and is still wanted in several countries for alleged offences and prison escapes. He is thought to have killed between 12 and 24 people in the 1970s and 1980s, his targets mostly young, Western backpackers and other tourists to Southeast Asia.

He was at one time nicknamed “the bikini killer” because two of his alleged victims were clad in bikinis when they were found.

Both charismatic and sadistic, Sobhraj was the subject of a GQ Magazine profile in 2014 in which he was described as “handsome, charming and utterly without scruple,” like “some bizarre real-life combination of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley (portrayed by Matt Damon in the film The Talented Mr. Ripley) and Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter.”

His MO was to drug and rob or drug and kill his victims. He stole their belongings and travelled the world on their passports. Many of the murders he is accused of were gruesome, the bodies burned and dumped.

That’s how Carrière and Bronzich were found in 1975 in Kathmandu, having suffered multiple stab wounds and set on fire.

By the time he was arrested in 1976, Sobhraj was linked with at least 10 murders spanning three years. He was convicted of “culpable homicide” for poisoning French tourist Jean-Luc Solomon, and sentenced to nine years.

In 1982 — along with his alleged Canadian lover, Marie- Andrée Leclerc of Levis, Que. — he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1975 murder of Israeli Allen Jacobs in Benares, India. Leclerc died in 1984.

After serving two decades in prison in India, Sobhraj was arrested in Nepal in 2003 for the slayings of the Canadian and the American. He was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to life in prison for Bronzich’s murder.

In September 2014, he was found guilty of Carrière’s murder but filed an appeal. On Tuesday, according to the site Review Nepal, the Patan Appellate Court in Kathmandu upheld the conviction.