Serial killer Charles Sobhraj was 'charming' and 'emanated power'

Sobhraj was represented by the infamous lawyer Jacques Vergès, nicknamed the “devil’s advocate” because his roster of clients included the Nazi Klaus Barbie, Slobodan Milosevic and the renowned international terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Sobhraj wanted payment for the interview but I refused and, to my surprise, he agreed to talk.

I had never been much interested in serial killers but I happened to read Richard Neville’s and Julie Clarke’s extraordinary account of the killings, The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj, just before Sobhraj’s release was announced. I couldn’t quite believe that someone who had confessed to a number of the murders to Neville, and against whom there was a wealth of compelling evidence, was free to walk the streets of a European capital.

The child of an affair between an Indian businessman-tailor and one of his Vietnamese shop assistants, Sobhraj (played in the BBC drama by French actor Tahar Rahim) had grown up in Saigon during the Vietnamese war of independence from France. His mother then married an occupying French soldier who, suffering from PTSD, returned to France with his young family. Sobhraj did not settle in his new home and twice stowed away on ships heading to Africa.

A bright but delinquent teenager, he was irresistibly drawn to crime – car theft, street muggings, and then holding up housewives with a gun. He spent most of his adolescence in Paris in and out of youth offender facilities and then their adult version. A well-

well-meaning prison visitor arranged work for him on the outside and also introduced him to a bourgeois young Parisian called Chantal Compagnon. They fell in love. He promised her that he was a reformed character and they got engaged, only for him to go back to prison for car theft.

But like so many women who were to follow, she had fallen under his spell. When he came out they embarked on a manic crime spree across Europe and Asia. It was 1970, the beginning of the so-called hippy trail, when hordes of young people would make long, low-budget trips through southern Europe, the Middle East, India and the far east. It was an era of porous borders and lax security, when the only contact with back home were poste restante letters that might take weeks to arrive. A generation was looking to find itself by getting lost or high somewhere off the beaten track. No one took much notice of who came and went.

It was in this transient milieu that Sobhraj stole from impressionable travellers. But first he was imprisoned in Greece – he escaped by swapping identities with his younger brother. Then he and Compagnon were imprisoned in Afghanistan. They had just had a daughter, who was sent back to live with Compagnon’s parents in France. Sobhraj managed to break out of prison by drugging a guard and then returned to France to kidnap his own daughter. When Compagnon finally got out, she was able to take the child and flee to America to escape Sobhraj’s destructive hold.

An embittered Sobhraj upped the crime stakes. He held a flamenco dancer hostage in a New Delhi hotel while he used her room to break into a gem store on the floor below. He became a famous outlaw in India. Like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, he assumed different identities, using stolen passports and creating a trail of havoc wherever he went. Ripley has been described as “suave, agreeable, and utterly immoral”, and those adjectives were not out of place for Sobhraj.