The dramatised series has again cast the spotlight on how a man who was once the world’s most wanted criminal wielded his charm and influence to get away with murder, while evading arrest at almost every turn.

New interviews with journalists who covered Sobhraj’s story and others who interacted with him reveal a chocolate-loving womaniser who exerted dominance over his fellow inmates while forming alliances with influential criminals.

‘A BOLLYWOOD ACTOR?’

The journalist traced Sobhraj back to a hotel in the Kathmandu tourist district of Thamel, where he discovered a man going by the name “C Gurmura” was staying. The mystery guest had told the hotel manager he was in Nepal to trade pashmina and set up a mineral water plant.

“Although the hotel didn’t initially have a copy of his passport, I was sure it was the same Charles Sobhraj because his middle name is Gurmukh,” said Nathan, adding that he acted on his hunch by approaching the man in a casino toilet a few days later.

“I asked him, ‘You look familiar – are you Charles Sobhraj?’,” Nathan said. “To this, in a distinctive French accent he asked: ‘Who is he – a Bollywood actor?’”

Nathan pointed out the man to S Ramesh – then a counsellor at the Indian Embassy in Kathmandu – who said he was easily able to identify Sobhraj because of his “prominent nose”.

“I was a bit shocked to see him there because he disappeared from public view after he was deported to France from India in 1997,” Ramesh said.

By this point, Nathan had deployed a team of photographers to track Sobhraj and managed to source a copy of his passport from the hotel, confirming his identity once and for all.

On September 17, his exclusive story “The Serpent Living Incognito in Thamel” appeared in The Himalayan Times. Two days later, Nepalese police launched a 4am raid of the casino where Sobhraj was still playing Baccarat and arrested the wanted fugitive.

PRISON KINGPIN

Before his arrest in Nepal, Sobhraj had been in and out of prison several times. His two decades in Tihar were for drugging and robbing a group of French students and killing a French tourist.

Gupta, who co-authored Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer, said Sobhraj would get massages and cooked meals from other inmates, as well as having his clothes laundered, in return for drafting their petitions, as he was well-versed in Indian law.

“He played cards, badminton and chess with prisoners and jail officials in Tihar,” Gupta said. Contraband confiscated from his cell included a knife, crockery and an electric heater.

The Serpent even managed to smuggle a voice recorder into prison, which he would use to record corrupt officials so that he could later blackmail them – a tactic Gupta suspects was used to secure his own position at Tihar on the day he first met Sobhraj.

Others to have benefited from his apparent generosity included RS Rathaur, an armed forces veteran and fellow Tihar inmate who Sobhraj helped out when his family was facing financial problems – partly paying for his daughter’s education.

“I returned the favour by standing surety for him at the time of his release,” Rathaur said.

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Sobhraj befriended a number of influential criminals while in Tihar, with whom he set up shop “dealing in narcotics and selling drugs and liquor”, according to a 1981 report from Indian human rights body the People’s Union of Civil Liberties.

The “brilliant psychopath” – as Richard Neville and Julie Clarke later described him in their book On the Trail of the Serpent: The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj – was imprisoned in a 12 foot by 10 foot (3.6m x 3m) Tihar cell, though he was often allowed to roam the jail, including when he gave foreign journalists interviews (for a fee) in which he confessed to at least 10 murders. These confessions were later recanted.

LADIES’ MAN

Perhaps because of the confidence he exuded, Sobhraj had a long line of romantic engagements – even in prison, more than 30 women would routinely join him, some of them for visits of a sexual nature, according to Gupta.

“He used the guest house of one of the top jail officials to meet his girlfriends,” the former Tihar prison worker said, adding that the Serpent would shed his everyday garb of kurta-pyjamas [a long shirt paired with loose-fitting trousers] in favour of a suit worn with a matching scarf whenever he had a woman visitor.

In the new BBC miniseries, the actor playing Sobhraj is seen carousing with his accomplice and then-partner Marie-Andrée Leclerc, who died of cancer in 1984.

Not shown, however, is the Serpent’s 2008 jailhouse marriage to Nihita Biswas, a woman 44 years his junior who apparently fell in love with him after acting as his interpreter. She told an Indian newspaper that Sobhraj would ask her to bring chocolates, canned chicken sausages, French bread, guava juice and green vegetables for him. He proposed to her three weeks after they first met.

Not all of the women in Sobhraj’s life were his lovers, however, he also had confidantes he described as “his sisters”. Indian journalist Hoihnu Hauzel was among them.

She contacted Sobhraj in 1997 after reading about his life and crimes as a young postgraduate student. Soon after receiving her first letter, Sobhraj telephoned her.

“He said, ‘Hello Hoihnu, this is Charles,” recalled Hauzel, who Sobhraj would later gift a pair of gold earrings and a Parker pen from Paris. “I couldn’t believe it was him on the other side.”

“He said that those people [he killed] were not good, they were anti-socials.”

ESCAPE ARTIST

In 1986, two years before he was set to be released from Tihar, Sobhraj orchestrated a dramatic prison break by giving confectionery laced with sedatives to his jailers.

He and six other inmates escaped in the ensuing confusion, but within three weeks the Serpent had been tracked to Goa and rearrested.

Those charges expired in 1995. Sobhraj left Tihar for the last time two years afterwards.

Gupta said the Serpent’s final stint in Indian prison was not as comfortable as his first – he was now kept in an isolated cell under strict surveillance.

“Once, he tried to smuggle narcotics in his cell with the help of a jail warden, but he was caught and cases were registered against both [of them],” Gupta said.

A CLAIM TO FAME

Upon his arrival in Paris, Sobhraj tried to cash in on his new-found infamy by charging “fans” US$5,000 to take photographs with him. He also attempted to sell the rights to his story for US$15 million.

Love ’70s fashion? ‘The Serpent’ has vintage sunglasses, crochet bikinis and retro pantsuits

It was around this time that he travelled to London and met novelist and script writer Farrukh Dhondy, who introduced him to a literary agent upon his request.

“My first impression of Charles was that he wasn’t the hypnotic, charismatic seducer of women that I had read about,” said Dhondy, who wrote a semifictional account of Sobhraj’s life called The Bikini Murders.

Calling Sobhraj an “existential amoralist” Dhondy said: “If he saw a gold necklace and wanted it, he’d think to himself – ‘I want that gold necklace. There seems to be a human being attached to it. Now if I got rid of that …’”

ALONE AT LAST

After living in Paris for six years, Sobhraj returned to Nepal in 2003 for reasons “known only to himself”, as the BBC miniseries puts it.

He has claimed in past interviews that he was sent to the country by the CIA to catch Taliban guerillas buying arms from Chinese triads – though the truth of these assertions has never been verified.

Nathan, the Himalayan Times journalist, said he believed a “super confident” Sobhraj had arrived in the country “assuming” that the warrants for his arrest issued in 1975 had lapsed.

In 2004, a court in Nepal convicted Sobhraj of murdering 29-year-old American Connie Jo Bronzich. In 2015, he was convicted of the murder of Bronzich’s 26-year-old Canadian friend Laurent Ormond Carrière.

From prison, the Serpent has reached out to old acquaintances, including Hauzel whom he called in 2010 and “insisted he will be out soon”. She never heard from him again.

Sobhraj also contacted Rathaur, his former Tihar inmate, seeking help for one of his female friends – but was told “not to call again”.

Now the 77-year-old, who underwent open heart surgery in 2017, ekes out what is left of his existence mostly “reading newspapers and watching television”, according to a prison official in Kathmandu who spoke on condition of anonymity.

His only regular visitor is his lawyer Shakuntala Thapa, Biswas’ mother, who previously said Sobhraj had petitioned for a 75 per cent waiver on his jail term.