By Sudeshna Sarkar, IANS
Kathmandu : Charles Sobhraj’s hope to ring in the New Year together with his wife and daughter in Paris received a blow Wednesday when Nepal’s Supreme Court, expected to deliver its verdict in the murder case that saw him jailed here for life, instead decided to review a related fake passport charge and pass sentence on both together.
“I wish I had a crystal ball,” a grim Sobhraj told IANS. “In Nepal, that’s the only way you can function.”
Judges Anup Raj Sharma and Top Bahadur Magar, who were hearing the final appeal of the yesteryears’ criminal mastermind against a 20-year jail term slapped in 2004 by Nepal’s district court for the 1975 murder of an American backpacker, Connie Jo Bronzich, told a court-room packed with journalists and lawyers that a fresh hearing would start.
Delivering the much-awaited verdict, which was delayed twice in the past, Justice Sharma said the court has decided to reopen the fake passport case with which Nepal’s police first charged Sobhraj when they arrested him from an upmarket casino here in September 2003.
Sobhraj, once known as the “Serpent” for his guile in breaking out of tightly guarded prisons, and dubbed the “bikini killer” by the tabloid press for the alleged killing of western tourists, hit the headlines worldwide in 2003 after a local newspaper spotted him in Thamel, the capital’s tourist hub, and published his photo along with an account of his former career in crime.
According to two books written about Sobhraj, he came to Nepal in 1975 using the passport of a Dutch tourist, Henricus Bintanja, and befriended Bronzich, who was with a Canadian companion, Laurent Armand Carriere.
In December 1975, the badly burnt bodies of the two tourists were found in different locations in Kathmandu valley.
The Nepal police are claiming that Sobhraj made a confession to the Indian police in 1976, when he was arrested there, saying he had killed the two.
Sobhraj, however, denies he ever made any confession and rejects the two books as inaccurate.
However, after the Himalayan Times daily spotted Sobhraj here in 2003, the police arrested him from the Yak and Yeti casino and first charged him with coming to Kathmandu nearly 30 years ago on a fake passport.
Though the court cleared him of the charge, he was rearrested from court premises the same day and charged with Bronzich’s killing.
The district court found him guilty and when he appealed against the sentence, two years ago, the appellate court returned the same verdict.
As a dogged Sobhraj contested the decision again in the Supreme Court, his hope for an answer, one way or the other, however, was blighted Wednesday as the judges ordered a review of the fake passport case, which indicates another lengthy trial ahead.
Sobhraj’s army of lawyers put a brave face on the decision.
“Now both the homicide case and the passport case will be heard together,” said Lok Bhakta Rana, one of his lawyers.
“It’s all part of a technical process.”
The verdict was also being awaited anxiously by the victims’ families.
By a quirk of fate, Bishwa Lal Shrestha, who was the investigating police officer in 1975 probing Bronzich’s murder, left the force to become a lawyer and was hired by Bronzich’s family to fight for her. Shrestha remained serene.
“We will have to wait,” he told IANS. “We have to have patience.”