Sobhraj’s battle
Sudeshna Sarkar

Books and film deals that helped Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj amass a fortune are, ironically, posing the gravest threat to his bid for freedom from Kathmandu’s Central Prison. He has been in the jail since 2003 after being arrested and sentenced guilty for the murder of an American backpacker in the 1970s. When his final trial in Nepal’s Supreme Court reopens on April 2, Sobhraj will appear personally. The 64-year-old says the state lawyers have perpetrated a Himalayan fraud on the court. The prosecution contends that an Australian, David Wilmoth, had taken the same flight to Kathmandu from Bangkok in 1976 as Sobhraj, sitting next to him and striking up a quick friendship.

If that is true, it strikes down Sobhraj’s assertion that he never came to Nepal before 2003 and provides strong circumstantial evidence to nail him for the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich, whose stabbed and badly burnt body was found on the way to the Kathmandu airport. The state attorneys are contending that Wilmoth, who moved to the US, came across a book in 1979. Serpentine, the book on Sobhraj’s exploits written by Thomas Thompson, carried the photograph of Sobhraj, whom Wilmouth immediately recognised as the passenger who had chatted him up on the way to Kathmandu. "It’s a crude fraud," Sobhraj, an expert on forgery himself, said. He will also attack the prosecution’s submission of a document, purportedly from an Indian court, that attributes 11 murders to him, including two in Nepal. "The prosecution says it is a copy of the documents tabled before Delhi district court judge Joginder Nath in the 1970s, detailing the ‘global murders’ committed by me," says a dismissive Sobhraj. "The so-called document is a computer printout. In the 1970s, there was no computer. All official documents came from typewriters."

"They also submitted a CD by National Geographic and called it my confessions before Interpol," Sobhraj said. The computer printout that describes the nature of the CD is an exact match of the court print-out, meaning they came out from the same computer." He says he is innocent, was framed by police and not given a fair trial. — IANS

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