‘You’re Charles’
He was jailed in India for poisoning a group of French tourists in the capital New Delhi in 1976, before he could stand trial on the charges against him in Thailand.
Sobhraj escaped from India’s Tihar Jail in 1986 by feeding sleeping pills to prison guards in biscuits and cakes.
Police arrested Sobhraj a few days later at a restaurant in the Indian beach holiday state of Goa.
“I went up to his table and said ‘You are Charles'”, Madhukar Zende, the police officer who caught him in Goa, told The Indian Express newspaper in an interview published on Friday.
Sobhraj’s statue is still installed in Goa’s restaurant. He remained in prison in India until 1997 when he returned to France.
Born to a Vietnamese mother and Indian father, he was described by his associates as a con artist, a traitor, a bandit and a murderer.
His exact number of victims, spread over decades and many countries, is unknown.
