While in prison, Sobhraj married Nihita Biswas, a Nepali woman 44 years his junior, in 2008.

Loading

“I’m happy and have great respect for our judiciary and Supreme court,” Sobhraj’s mother-in-law Sakuntala Thapa said after news of his release was announced.

Sobhraj has denied killing the American woman, and his lawyers said the charge against him was based on assumption.

Several years later, he was also found guilty of killing Bronzich’s Canadian friend, Laurent Carriere.

He was also suspected of many more murders, including in Thailand, where police say he allegedly drugged and killed six women in the 1970s, some of whom turned up dead on a beach near the resort of Pattaya.

‘You are Charles’

Sobhraj was jailed in India for poisoning a group of French tourists in the capital, New Delhi, in 1976, before he could stand trial on the charges against him in Thailand.

He escaped from India’s Tihar jail in 1986 after drugging prison guards with cookies and cakes laced with sleeping pills.

Police arrested Sobhraj days later at a restaurant in the Indian beach holiday state of Goa.

“I walked up to their table and said ‘you are Charles’“, Madhukar Zende, the police officer who caught him in Goa, told The Indian Express newspaper in an interview published on Friday.

A statue of Sobhraj stands at the restaurant in Goa to this day. He was jailed in India until 1997 when he returned to France.

Born to a Vietnamese mother and an Indian father, he was described by his associates as a con artist, a seducer, a robber and a murderer.