TNN
 
Kathmandu, Dec 1:  His visit to Nepal six years ago might have proved unlucky for yesteryear’s crime maestro Charles Sobhraj but the 65-year-old has certainly proved lucky for the judges who presided over his marathon trial, with two of them becoming Nepal’s chief justices.

Sobhraj, who has been fighting the only murder conviction in a career in audacious crimes that spanned nearly two decades and over a dozen countries, received a blow this year when his appeal against a guilty verdict was put on hold by two of the seniormost judges in Nepal’s Supreme Court.

In January, the French national of Indian origin was hoping to be acquitted of the murder of an American tourist in Nepal in the 70s when, to his chagrin, the two judges hearing the case stalled the verdict and instead, asked for a lesser case of passport forgery, that had been dismissed in 2003, to be re-opened.

The two judges who pronounced the order were Min Bahadur Rayamajhi and Kalyan Shrestha. Four months later, Rayamajhi became the chief justice of Nepal following the retirement of the incumbent, Kedar Giri.

Now with Rayamajhi due to retire this month, the government has announced his successor. The honour will now go to Anup Raj Sharma. In an eerie coincidence, Sharma was one of the two judges in December 2007 who were expected to deliver the final verdict on Sobhraj’s appeal against the life term for murder but shied away. Instead, the two judges too asked a lower court to re-open the same lesser case of passport forgery.

Nepal police claim Sobhraj came to Nepal in 1975, using the passport of a Dutch tourist he had befriended and killed in Bangkok. However, Sobhraj has been challenging the allegation, saying police implicated him by forging his signature. When he was sighted in a Kathmandu casino in 2003 and arrested, police initially charged him with having entered Nepal almost three decades ago on a false passport. When the Kathmandu district court dismissed the case, he was rearrested from court premises while police charged him with the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975.

Now the two senior judges, who had been hearing his appeal against the 20-year jail term, with both advocating reopening the false passport case, have been elevated. While Rayamajhi is the chief justice, Sharma will follow him this month. Sobhraj’s lawyers however feel that the two judges, despite their seniority, quelled before the thought of public opinion and preferred to procrastinate.

Sobhraj told TNN that the murder case did not have any evidence and any impartial judge would hesitate to pronounce him guilty. On the other hand, given the media outcry against Sobhraj, an acquittal could have affected the career of the two judges. Now Sobhraj, spending his days in Kathmandu’s Central Jail, will face fresh courtroom battle from Dec 23. He is challenging the decision of the Patan Appellate Court which this year finally resolved the false passport case, finding him guilty and sentencing him to a fine as well as a year’s imprisonment.

In the ensuing new battles, the main trial – for murder – is getting delayed every year. Sobhraj’s lawyer Shakuntala Thapa, who is also the mother of his 20-year-old fiancée Nihita Biswas, sounded despondent when she agreed that by challenging the passport verdict her team had actually lengthened Sobhraj’s stay behind bars.

"We could have proceeded to the murder case," she told TNN. "But we had to challenge the passport verdict even though this will delay the other trial. The passport case is important because if the court finds Sobhraj guilty of having entered Nepal in 1975, it will give the Supreme Court a handle to return the guilty verdict in the murder case."

Thapa deplored the entire trial as a farce. "All through six years, police never produced a single original document but only Xeroxes, which are not admissible as evidence by Nepal’s law. But when so many judges ignored that, what can you do except conclude that there was strong bias against Sobhraj?"