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Established 1961 11 Lifestyle Features Tuesday, June 22, 2021 In this file photo taken on April 7, 1997, Charles Sobhraj (center) is escorted by In this file photo taken on June 12, 2014, Sobhraj is escorted by Nepalese police at This photo taken on May 25, 2021 shows former police police upon his arrival at Indira Gandhi International Airport near New Delhi, from a district court for a hearing on a case related to the murder of Canadian back- officer Sompol Suthimai writing next to old photo- where he was deported to France. — AFP photos packer Laurent Ormond Carriere in Bhaktapur. graphs of his time as an Interpol officer in Bangkok. early half a century after he sowed parentage - arrived in Bangkok in Oct had to stop.” fear along the 1970s “hippie trail”, 1975 with his Canadian girlfriend and an Together with Dutch diplomat Herman NFrench serial killer Charles Sobhraj, Indian associate. Knippenberg, she set about gathering evi- the “Serpent” of the hit TV drama series, They moved into a flat in the same dence on the slippery Sobhraj, a conman still haunts the lives of those who crossed building as Gires, near Bangkok’s notori- with a hatful of different identities and his path. Now 77 and jailed in solitary con- ous Patpong red light district. What adept at covering his tracks. Gires finement in Nepal since 2003, Sobhraj is became the Serpent’s lair was demolished searched Sobhraj’s apartment and went suspected of involvement in at least a years ago, but the disused apartment around backpacker haunts looking for dozen murders around Asia in the 1970s. block that stood in for it in the TV series clues about missing persons. In one of the His modus operandi was to charm and has become a minor tourist attraction. most dramatic, high-tension scenes of the befriend his victims - many of them starry- Gires, aged 22 at the time, was impressed TV show, Sobhraj bumps into her unex- eyed Western backpackers on a quest for by Sobhraj - not least when he told her he pectedly. spirituality - before drugging, robbing and was a gemstone trader, a tactic he used to The moment in March 1976 that murdering them. The TV series, made lure cash-strapped backpackers. formed the basis for the scene is still jointly by the BBC and Netflix, conjures “He was cultured, courteous. As neigh- seared into Gires’s memory. “In a hotel the seedy, steamy Bangkok of the 1970s bors, it didn’t take long for us to get to lobby, someone tapped me on the shoul- with sepia tones, flared trousers and traf- know each other,” she said. But doubts der,” says Gires, who travelled to London fic-clogged streets. French star Tahar soon arose. “Many people were getting to help the show’s scriptwriters. “It was This photo taken on May 20, 2021 shows the Baan Bellawin apartments, where parts of the him. It was the most terrifying moment of television series “The Serpent” was filmed, in Bangkok. my life.” Fearing for her life, she agreed to let him take her home, hoping to avoid issued an international arrest warrant. says Clarke, now retired and living in arousing his suspicions. “My heart was Sobhraj was arrested in New Delhi in July Sydney. “He considered himself as a crim- beating 100,000 times a minute but he 1976 and spent two decades in an Indian inal hero.” didn’t notice anything,” she says. jail for manslaughter and drugging and Clarke and Neville’s book, “On the Trail Even now, barely a day goes by without robbing tourists. He went to France after of the Serpent”, became a bestseller and Gires thinking about Sobhraj, and the fear his release and lived there quietly until was the basis of the TV serial. Since then, lingers. “I need to know he is held within 2003 before returning to Nepal, where he Sobhraj has denied the crimes, and his four walls. The thought of him being free was jailed for two murders, and has been French lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre terrifies me. What could he do now that he behind bars ever since. says the confessions in the book are “fab- knows I knew?” she says. Sobhraj’s alleged crimes in Thailand ricated”. But Clarke says Sobhraj is trying have long passed the statute of limitations, to “rewrite history” in the hope of getting The policeman and Sompol is left to rue his colleagues’ out of jail. Sompol Suthimai is 90 now, but the failings four decades ago. “The police did The few months she spent in the shad- memories of his “most interesting” case not pay much attention. They made a ow of the killer left her with “traumatic still burn bright. As a Thai police officer mess,” he sighs. memories”. “We had nightmares. From his working with Interpol, he was on holiday prison, he wrote us missives and dictated in early 1976 when - under pressure from The writer us his orders. He had also sent people to This photo taken on June 9, 2021 shows Nadine Gires during an interview with AFP in Knippenberg - the Bangkok Post pub- Nakhon Si Thammarat, where she now runs a hotel by Khanom beach. From his jail cell, Sobhraj sold his story watch us,” she says. But his magnetism lished photos of murdered tourists. “I to a publishing house, and in July 1977 was obvious. “If you were a student travel- said to myself: This is a joke - how is it Australian journalists Julie Clarke and er on the hippie trail, how could you not Rahim plays Sobhraj, oozing mesmeriz- sick in his home. I jokingly said to Charles: possible that so many people have been Richard Neville were dispatched to meet trust this man who was into Buddhism and ing, manipulative menace - in a frighten- ‘You’re putting a curse on them’.” But killed without it being known by the him. They paid guards to get regular Hinduism, who dropped Nietzsche into the ingly familiar way for one of those who Gires, now aged 67 and running a hotel by police?” Sompol says. access to him, and a strange relationship conversation and gave you tips on where knew him. the beach in southern Thailand, says she He rushed back to Bangkok and met developed. “We’d been down the hippie to stay?” she says. had no idea what Sobhraj was really up to. Knippenberg, who was initially suspi- road too, so we were obsessed with this Sobhraj’s days of high living are far The neighbor “We thought it was weird, but how could cious, having tried and failed to get the case,” Clarke told AFP. behind him, and the prison governor in When Nadine Gires visited the set of we imagine such a scheme?” she says. Thai police to take an interest in the Over the course of their meetings, Nepal has told him he will die behind bars, the series in 2019, seeing Rahim in char- But everything changed at Christmas case. Eventually the diplomat passed Clarke says, the “charming” Sobhraj according to his lawyer. But Clarke says acter as Sobhraj brought the past flooding 1975, when a young Frenchman staying Sompol the dossier of evidence he had recounted the murders in chilling detail, his resilience is remarkable - while in back. “I was terrified. I thought he had with Sobhraj showed them a safe full of amassed with Gires - diaries and plane keeping nothing back. At one point he prison he has survived open heart surgery. escaped from prison, that he was coming forged passports. “He told us: ‘He poisons tickets belonging to the victims found at described pouring petrol on a young “He won his bet with his mother - to die back to do evil,” she told AFP. “Everything people’. He was terrified,” she explains. Sobhraj’s flat. Dutchman and setting him on fire after old,” she says. — AFP came back: anger, fear.” Sobhraj - a “He was not only a swindler, a seducer, a But Sobhraj had managed to flee the beating him. “He despised backpackers, Frenchman of Vietnamese and Indian robber of tourists, but an evil murderer. It kingdom a few days earlier. Sompol he saw them as poor young drug addicts,” eing left paralyzed by the same motor-neurone disease that inca- Guilhem Gallart, known as Pone, lies on a bed Bpacitated Stephen Hawking has not at his home in Gaillac in the south of France kept one French hip-hop artist from mak- on June 16, 2021. — AFP ing music - with nothing but his eyes. Guilhem “Pone” Gallart, a founding mem- affecting the ability to move, speak, eat ber of French rap collective Fonky Family, and breathe unassisted. But technology first fell ill with amyotrophic lateral sclero- has reopened possibilities for Gallart, sis (ALS) in 2015, and it has left him who is in his 40s. “I have rediscovered bedridden and on permanent life support. the Pone that I knew before,” said his An aerial view taken on June 6, 2021 shows the Well of Barhout, known as the “Well of Hell”, in the desert of Yemen’s Al-Mahra But with the aid of software that tracks wife Wahiba. “And even stronger than he province. — AFP his eye movements to imitate the actions was before.” of a mouse, he is able to compose and The results are there to hear on his prison for the demons - a reputation bol- the inside of the well have said they are write, as well as speak with a computer- new album, which, as the title suggests, stered by the foul odours rising from its almost impossible to capture - local generated voice.