CHARLES SOBHRAJ: INSIDE THE HEART OF THE BIKINI KILLER

Author : Raamesh Koirala

Publisher : Rupa, Rs 500

Koirala’s book is about Sobhraj’s criminal psychology, his utter lack of remorse, and narcissism, says Gautam Mukherjee

Author Raamesh Koirala is a renowned cardiac surgeon in Nepal. He successfully treated Charles Sobhraj’s precarious heart condition in 2017.  This was 14 years after Sobhraj was first arrested and jailed in Kathmandu in 2003. And as he replaced a number of the valves in Sobhraj’s heart, Koirala became fascinated enough with the master criminal to write this book.

Much of what Koirala writes about Sobhraj is on his “criminal psychology”, his utter lack of remorse, his narcissism as a psychopath. And the long trail of alleged murders in several countries without apparent motive. He revisits some of the alleged murders and disappearances in other countries to establish how Sobhraj sometimes stole both the passports and identities of his victims. He then believed that he was whoever he became.

Sobhraj got away with many of his alleged murders because of circumstantial evidence, lack of witnesses, and his clear-eyed and well-presented professions of innocence in court. Sobhraj also took great interest in the law wherever he was accused, reading up on it, and guided his lawyers on the conduct of his trials. However, in Nepal, in the later days, he seems to have met his match. The big question that Koirala asks Sobhraj in this book, however, is: Why did he return to Nepal at all where murder charges awaited him, even after three decades? It earned him a life sentence for a murder going back to 1975, and more cases were framed as the time went on.

 Koirala writes: “In 2003, there were nearly 190 countries in the world. Charles Sobhraj was free and living a happy life in France. He was a celebrity, believed to be making a hefty sum of money from interviews and photo sessions. He even had a million dollar contract with an Indian filmmaker who wanted to make his biopic. His jail term in India was over; the Thai police had closed the cases of the murders. Only one country in the world had active cases of murder against him — Nepal.”

A would-be biopic on Sobhraj is probably less interesting, despite the alleged multiple druggings, murders, and robberies on the hippie trail of the Seventies, in India, Thailand, Nepal — than what is revealed in this book.

Sobhraj tells all, quite casually, but Koirala frames the revelations in a fantasy sequence that he calls a “dream” about a TV interview he conducts with the master criminal. Wisely perhaps, because what Sobhraj puts out is uncorroborated.

He says the real reason Sobhraj had come to Nepal — he insisted for the first time in 2003, in Sobhraj’s own words — was because: “I wanted to organise an undercover business meeting of some guys from the Taliban with a Chinese heroin producer in the Golden Triads. And second one was a meeting with top brass from India.”

He claims he knew Masood Azhar, the man much discussed today as the mastermind of the JeM, from their time in Tihar together: “He introduced me to all the Taliban leaders. That’s actually why I visited Afghanistan several times.” He further tells Koirala,

“I had good relations with the Taliban and the Al Qaeda. You know, I even had a nuclear deal with Saddam Hussein… Yes I had a business contract to supply red mercury to Iraq and had already made a deal with a Russian group. But then 2003 happened.”

Koirala was hard-pressed to determine if Sobhraj meant the “attack on Iraq by the USA” or his own 2003 arrest in Nepal. Sobhraj claimed to have also been in touch with the CIA, warning them about the possibility of 9/11. And that he was in Nepal to meet with India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), with which he was on good terms since “it was me who facilitated the return of that hijacked Indian Airlines plane from Kandahar”.

And to heap more preposterousness on the gullible, Sobhraj says: “Advani escaped an assassination due to my tip.” Koirala who mixes the tale with medical talk, a little politics, and his love of trekking in the mountains, does not think Charles Sobhraj will ever be released from jail in Nepal.