Nepal’s top court yesterday ordered the release of Charles Sobhraj, the French serial killer portrayed in the Netflix series “The Serpent” who was responsible for a string of murders across Asia in the 1970s.

The Supreme Court ruled Sobhraj, 78, who has been in prison in the Himalayan republic since 2003 for murdering two North American tourists, should be freed on health grounds.
“Keeping him in the prison continuously is not in line with the prisoner’s human rights,” read a copy of the verdict seen by AFP.

“If there is not any other pending cases against him to keep him in the prison, this court orders his release by today and… the return to his country within 15 days.”
After a troubled childhood and several prison terms in France for petty crimes, Sobhraj began travelling the world in the early 1970s and wound up in the Thai capital Bangkok.

His modus operandi was to charm and befriend his victims — many of them starry-eyed Western backpackers on a quest for spirituality — before drugging, robbing and murdering them.

Suave and sophisticated, he was implicated in his first murder, that of a young American woman whose body was found on a beach in Pattaya wearing a bikini, in 1975.