The Serpent serial killer says he will SUE the BBC over ‘falsified’ TV series as he starts a new life in France after release from prison
- The killer Charles Sobhraj’s lawyer said he plans to sue the BBC and Netflix
- The Serpent was broadcast last year and depicted Sobhraj’s murder timeline
- However his lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre said he claims it is ’70 per cent’ false
- Sobhraj was released after a 19-year sentence and landed in Paris on Saturday
The Serpent serial killer has said he will sue the BBC over its ‘falsified’ TV series as he starts a new life in prison after being released from prison.
The lawyer for Charles Sobhraj said his top priorities included filing lawsuits against the BBC and Netflix, co-producers of last year’s series.
Sobhraj’s life of crime and links to more than 20 killings were dramatised in the eight-part BBC miniseries ‘The Serpent’.
Lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre said Sobhraj has watched the show and claims it was ‘garbage first of all, and that 70 per cent of it is totally false’.
The Serpent serial killer has said he will sue the BBC over its ‘falsified’ TV series as he starts a new life in prison after being released from prison (Pictured: The killer, Charles Sobhraj, on a flight back to Paris on Saturday)
Sobhraj’s life of crime and links to more than 20 killings were dramatised in the eight-part BBC miniseries ‘The Serpent’v (Pictured: Tahar Rahim who played Sobhraj)
She told news outlet France Info that Sobhraj also plans to sue the state of Nepal, according to The Telegraph.
Sobhraj touched down in the capital city’s Charles de Gaulle airport at 7am on Saturday morning after being released from a prison in Nepal where he served 19 years for his murderous crimes.
Meeting him in Paris was barrister Ms Coutant-Peyre, the girlfriend of ‘Carlos the Jackal’ – the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, who is serving multiple life sentences in a high-security prison in eastern France.
Confirming that she was at Charles de Gaulle to pick Sobhraj up and drive him to a secret address in the greater Paris area on Saturday, Ms Coutant-Peyr said: ‘It’s taken him more than nineteen years to regain his freedom and I am very happy and also very outraged.
‘He was unjustly sentenced on a file fabricated with documents falsified by the Nepalese police.
‘It’s a scandal that he’s been presented as a serial killer – the accusation is completely false.’
On the flight to France on Friday, Sobhraj proclaimed his innocence and said his conviction was based on fake documents.
He told AFP: ‘I’m fine. I have a lot of things to do. I have to sue many people, including the state of Nepal.’
‘The courts in Nepal… all the judges, they were biased against Charles Sobhraj.’
Sobhraj’s lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre (pictured) said Sobhraj has watched the show and claims it was ‘garbage first of all, and that 70 per cent of it is totally false’
Sobhraj touched down in the capital city’s Charles de Gaulle airport at 7am on Saturday morning after being released from a prison in Nepal where he served 19 years for his murderous crimes
On the Qatar Airways flight to Paris, he also told a reporter: ‘I didn’t do anything. I am innocent in those cases, OK? So, I don’t have to feel bad for that, or good. I am innocent. It was built on fake documents.’
Nepal’s Supreme Court had ordered that Sobhraj, who was serving a life sentence – 20 years in Nepal – be released because he was suffering from a heart condition and had also almost completed his two decades inside.
Sobhraj was incarcerated in Nepal in 2003 after being convicted of murdering two American tourists.
The master criminal was born in Saigon, then part of French Indochina, in 1944, to an Indian father and Vietnamese mother who later married a French Army officer.
Sobhraj moved to France as a teenager, where he fell into a life of petty crime, and was first imprisoned for burglary in Paris in 1963.
His first wife was Chantal Compagnon, a young Parisienne, and the mother of his daughter, Usha.
The family’s jet-setting lifestyle was largely financed by Sobhraj posing as a jewellery salesman, and then drugging, robbing and then murdering victims, many of them tourists.
Charles Sobhraj, a French serial killer who was responsible for a string of murders across Asia in the 1970s, was released from prison in Nepal on health grounds. He is pictured being escorted to a Nepal court in May 2014
Those he killed with the help of his lover and accomplice, Marie-Andrée Leclerc – whom he formed a relationship with after leaving Compagnon -included backpackers.
By 1975, the couple were being assisted in their crimes by Ajay Chowdhury, an Indian friend.
Sobhraj claimed that the murders were often accidental drug overdoses, but detectives proved that he in fact wanted them out of the way so that they would not report him to the authorities.
Sobhraj was eventually linked to more than 20 killings, and police dubbed him ‘The Serpent’ because of the way he used numerous fake identities to evade justice.
In The Serpent, Sobhraj was played by Tahar Rahim, the 41-year-old French-Algerian actor, who also happens to live in Paris.
It is believed Sobhraj committed his first murder in 1975, that of a 21-year-old woman from Seattle called Teresa Knowlton. Her body was found on a beach in Pattaya, Thailand wearing a bikini.
This inspired the killer’s nickname ‘The Bikini Killer’.
His next victim was Vitali Hakim, whose burnt body was found on the road to the Pattaya resort, followed by fiancées Henk Bintanja and Cornelia Hemker, who had been poisoned by Sobhraj and then nursed back to health.
While they were staying with him, a visit from Hakim’s French girlfriend, Charmayne Carrou, threatened to expose him, and so he strangled the pair and burned their bodies.
Sobhraj’s murders inspired the 2021 BBC drama ‘The Serpent’ which starred Tahar Rahim as the killer and Jenna Coleman as his lover, Marie-Andrée Leclerc
Sobhraj was eventually handed a life sentence in 2004 for killing US tourist Connie Jo Bronzich (left) in 1975. A decade later he was also found guilty of killing Bronzich’s Canadian companion Laurent Carrière, right
He murdered at least two others in Thailand before fleeing to Kolkata, India, where he killed student Avoni Jacob simply to obtain his passport. He later murdered Jean-Luc Solomon by poisoning him.
In 1976, Sobhraj attempted to drug a group of 60 French students on holiday in New Delhi in an attempt to rob them of passports and cash by giving them sleeping pills disguised as antibiotics.
Sobhraj claimed that the murders were often accidental drug overdoses, but detectives proved that he in fact wanted them out of the way so that they would not report him to the authorities.
But this time it backfired when the poison began working faster than he expected. When the first few students began falling where they stood, the others became alarmed and called the police. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for murder.
He was eventually linked to more than 20 killings. His victims were strangled, beaten or burned, and he often used the passports of his male victims to travel to his next destination.
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