Charles Sobhraj, a convicted killer who police suspect was responsible for a string of murders in the 1970s and 1980s, was due to be freed on Friday after nearly 20 years in prison in Nepal, his lawyer said.

Sobhraj, 78, a French national, is suspected of killing more than 20 western backpackers on the “hippie trail” through Asia, usually by drugging their food or drink in the course of robbing them.

Nepal’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered his release from prison, where he has served 19 years of his 20- year sentence, citing his age.

He had been held in a high-security jail in Kathmandu since 2003, when he was arrested on charges of murdering American backpacker Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975.

“We will release him and take him to the department of immigration tomorrow morning,” said Ishwari Prasad Pandey, a jailor at the Central Jail in Kathmandu.

Memory of body

A former Nepalese police officer who was instrumental in the arrest of Sobhraj in 2003 on Thursday said it was the painful childhood memory of the sight of a half-burnt body of Bronzich in a river in Kathmandu that spurred him to become a detective.

Ganesh K.C. was 40 and the deputy police superintendent in 2003 when he arrested Sobhraj from a casino in Kathmandu.

“I was barely 12 when I saw people rushing near the Manahara river in Kathmandu to get a glimpse of the body of Connie Jo Bronzich,” he said.

Ganesh recounted the chain of events that lead to Sobhraj’s arrest.

“He landed in Kathmandu on the pretext of filming a documentary. He was spotted near Royale Casino in Durbarmarg and The Himalayan Times newspaper published his photograph. The photograph got Kathmandu Metropolitan Police to launch a manhunt,” he recollected.

Sobhraj was jailed in India for poisoning a group of French tourists in Delhi in 1976.

Sobhraj escaped from Tihar jail in 1986 after drugging prison guards with sweets laced with sleeping pills.

Days later, the police caught him at a restaurant in Goa.

Like film shoot

Armando Gonsalves still remembers the evening of April 6, 1986, when the then Mumbai crime branch inspector, Madhukar Zende, brandished a gun to arrest Shobhraj, who was sitting on an adjacent table in a restaurant at Porvorim in Goa.

“A wedding was underway at the other side of the restaurant,” local businessman Gonsalves said.

“For a few moments, I thought it was a movie shoot,” he said.

Sobhraj and his friend David Hall had given up without a fight, but the police were not in a mood to take any chance, so they started searching for a rope to tie him to the chair, Gonsalves said.

“I along with my friend rushed to the kitchen and got a rope, using which Sobhraj was tied,” he recalled.