Sobhraj flays court for punishing his girlfriend, lawyer

KATHMANDU - From his tightly guarded cell in Kathmandu’s Central Jail, yesteryear’s “Bikini Killer” Charles Sobhraj has lashed out at a court verdict against his Nepali girlfriend Nihita Biswas and her mother Shakuntala Thapa, four days after the two were sentenced to prison and fined for contempt of court.

However, the 66-year-old convicted killer’s tirade against the judges and Nepal’s judiciary was completely ignored by the Nepali media, which said it was tired of his “antics”.

A ranting Sobhraj issued a three-page rambling statement written in a spidery hand and marked with hastily striked-out errors. It was circulated to the media Friday by his French lawyer in Paris, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre.

It was a vicious - and lawyers said ill-advised - attack on Nepal’s judiciary, describing the trial of Nihita and Thapa as an “inquisition… reminiscent of the dark and feudal ages”.

Though the judges presiding over the trial - Balaram KC and Ram Kumar Prasad Shah - had admonished Nihita, saying she could not call herself Sobhraj’s wife as they were never legally married, a defiant Sobhraj called her his wife, “Nihita Biswas Sobhraj”.

He said it was “shocking” that Nihita and her mother were handed a prison term and fine even after apologising.

The Sobhraj saga in Nepal, which had started in the 1970s’ hippie era, got a new twist three months ago after Nepal’s Supreme Court found him guilty of the murder of an American backpacker, Connie Jo Bronzich, in 1975, and closed the case by sentencing him to life imprisonment.

The verdict was challenged by Nihita, who claims to have married Sobhraj last year when he was still in prison, and her mother Thapa, who is also his lawyer. They called the verdict biased and alleged the judges were bribed.

The flagrant accusations, made before a media cohort and spread worldwide, resulted in two lawyers bringing a contempt of court charge against the mother-daughter duo.

Mulayam Singh Yadav Shah, who heard the contempt case as well, and Balaram KC Monday sentenced the two to a week in prison. However, keeping in mind the recommendations for leniency by leading lawyers, the judges gave the pair the option of paying a nominal fine instead of doing time.

But the judges showed greater severity towards Thapa, saying as a lawyer she should have defended the court and not attacked it. The sentence also seeks to bar her from ever becoming a judge, and the judges asked the Judicial Council to draft a law that will prevent people convicted of contempt of court from becoming judges.

Sobhraj flayed the ban as well, saying it amounted to “blackmailing lawyers into submission” and handing down a punishment when there is no law to support it.

The ban on Thapa has also generated a debate in Nepal’s bar association with lawyers saying they would oppose such a law.

Sobhraj alleged there was “rampant corruption and incompetence” in Nepal’s judiciary, citing three cases in which the accused were freed by the court.

One of them was British drug baron William Gordon Robinson, who was caught at the Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu with drugs concealed in his shoes but was let off around 2004. The release caused an uproar and led to the judges involved being disgraced.

The other two cases were of a Nepali drug smuggler and an extortionist-kidnapper who was released on bail whereupon he committed another daring kidnapping.

Though Sobhraj was the cynosure of the media after his arrest and during his own trial, his ravings were ignored by Nepal’s media that feels he and his girlfriend deserved their fate.

A senior Supreme Court lawyer, who did not want to be named, said the unrestrained attack by Sobhraj on Nepal’s judiciary would recoil on the head of Thapa.

Thapa could have been returned to the legal profession after keeping a low profile but now, after the attack on the judiciary by a person as notorious as Sobhraj, she would find herself without friends or clients, he said.