By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS
Kathmandu : With Nepal’s Supreme Court poised to deliver in 10 days the final verdict in a decades-old murder case that put yesteryear crime maestro Charles Sobhraj behind bars for life, his lawyers are suggesting that police forged the documents that led to his conviction.
Badri Bahadur Karki, a former attorney-general who is now defending Sobhraj in the sensational murder case that revived world interest in Sobhraj in 2003 – he had been leading a quiet life in Paris until then – says two critical documents produced by police are dubious and have no legal value.
Nepal’s district and appellate courts found Sobhraj guilty on the basis of these documents. Jailed in Kathmandu’s tightly guarded central jail since 2003, Sobhraj apparently has had ample time to piece the jigsaw out.
“I was arrested in September 2003,” he says, referring to police sweeping down on him in a casino in Kathmandu and charging him with the murder of American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975 after a local newspaper spotted him and published his photograph.
“However, for two days, police kept the arrest secret. They announced it only on the third day after they had collected samples of my signature and handwriting.”
In the first 48 hours of his arrest, Sobhraj said, police told him they suspected discrepancies in his passport and asked him to provide them with samples of his signature and handwriting so that they could verify the passport details.
“I gave them nine pages of my signatures and six pages of writing,” Sobhraj told IANS. “I had no reason to suspect anything because I had a clear conscience.”
Nepal police say Sobhraj came to Nepal in 1975 using the tampered passport of a Dutch tourist, Henricus Bintanja.
He allegedly stayed in two upmarket hotels – Malla and Soaltee Crowne Plaza – signing the guest register as Henricus Bintanja.
The signatures in the two guest registers, police say, tally with the signature in Sobhraj’s own passport and prove he had come to Nepal and killed Bronzich.
“How can that be possible?” Sobhraj asks. “My passport is signed in the name of Charles Sobhraj. How can that resemble Henricus Bintanja?”
What Sobhraj, who is an expert on forged passports, and his lawyers suspect is that after police took copies of his signature, they tried to copy it on a falsified guest register and then produced a photocopy of the “evidence”.
Karki points this out in his arguments before the two Supreme Court judges who will decide Sobhraj’s fate on Dec 19.
“The documents are 90 percent illegible and therefore have no legal value,” he says. “They have been photocopied through a folded plastic bag.
“This could imply that they are a crude forgery.”
Sobhraj’s lawyers have also presented the testimony of a French handwriting expert, dismissing the two photocopies as fakes.
In addition, they are citing a case in India featuring Sobhraj, where the Delhi High Court dismissed the evidence of the handwriting expert produced by police, saying it was his “opinion” and should not be taken as evidence unless corroborated by other evidence.
The lawyers are also refuting the police contention that the murdered girl’s diary contained Sobhraj’s address, which proved they had met.
The diary entry contains Bintanja’s address, Sobhraj’s lawyers say, which can’t be construed as Sobhraj’s.
It remains to be seen if the judges will be swayed by the argument.
The final verdict has been delayed twice and the defendant’s side is keeping its fingers crossed that on Dec 19, it will not be put off a third time.