Sleeping past catches up with Charles Sobhraj

When his final appeal for freedom is heard in Nepal's top court in November, Charles Sobhraj, one of the most wanted criminals in the world in the 70s, will have to contend with his sleeping past that is threatening to catch up with him now.

With Nepal's Supreme Court assigning Nov 1 as the next date when Sobhraj's appeal against life imprisonment for a 30-year-old murder is to be heard, there is an ironic chance of the French national being hoisted by his own petard.

Fate has sent Nepal police at least one chance witness, who could actually nail him for murder.

In a sensational twist to the four-year-old Sobhraj saga in Nepal, that has generated worldwide interest, a man - who was allegedly chosen by Sobhraj to be his third victim in Nepal - has got in touch with Interpol, willing to testify that he travelled with Sobhraj to Kathmandu.

Sobhraj, who was arrested from a Kathmandu casino in 2003 and given a life term the following year for killing American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975, has been fighting the verdict and demanding that the people associated with the incident be called as witnesses.

Sobhraj has been saying, throughout his trial and the subsequent first appeal, which he lost, that he never came to Nepal in 1975 but made his first trip in 2003 when he was arrested on the basis of media reports.

However, according to the statement given by David Will Mouth, a resident of Wellington, New Zealand, to Interpol, when he visited Kathmandu on Sep 24, 1975, on a Thai Airways flight, he made the acquaintance of a man called Alan Gautier, who befriended him and offered to take him around in Nepal.

Alan Gautier was the name under which Sobhraj had been living in Bangkok in the 70s, where he had been systematically befriending young Western tourists, drugging them, robbing them of their passports and valuables and killing the ones who got suspicious.

Mouth, a budget traveller, was staying in a smaller hotel in Kathmandu and for two days the man he knew as Gautier sent him a car with the offer to take him to Dhulikhel, a tourist resort close to Kathmandu.

According to the picture put together by the Nepal police, "Gautier" also befriended Bronzich and her Canadian boyfriend Laurent Armand Carriere and offered them the hired car to show them around.

On Dec 21, 1975, Carriere's badly burnt body was found outside Kathmandu and two days later, Bronzich was found killed in an identical way.

On Dec 23, the day Bronzich's body was found, someone using Carriere's passport flew to Bangkok and returned the next day.

According to police, it was Sobhraj and now, if Mouth can identify him as having been on the same flight, it will establish Sobhraj's guilt.

Mouth told Interpol he became aware of the furore in 2004 after the international media reported Sobhraj's dramatic arrest and conviction. He recognised the photograph of the man in the papers as his travelling companion.

Both police and Mouth think he had a narrow escape. A bout of dysentery had forced him to turn down the invitation to go to Dhulikhel. But had he been well and accepted the offer, he could have ended up sharing Bronzich and Carriere's fate.

The 62-year-old Sobhraj has been using his time in prison familiarising himself with Nepal's criminal law. He feels the witnesses, under his expert cross-examination, would fail to identify him and lead to his release.

(IANS)

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