Called ‘The Serpent’ by some, ‘The Bikini Killer’ by others, Charles Sobhraj is a name Malaysians may remember from the 1970s.

He travelled the globe seeking to manipulate followers into abetting him in his crimes, escaped from the authorities of different countries multiple times – including Malaysia – and even used some of his victims’ passports to travel with.

In addition to his other crimes such as theft and drug dealing, he is believed to have committed 20 to 30 murders.

Born in 1944 in French-occupied Vietnam, Charles Gurmukh Sobhraj is of Indian Vietnamese heritage. His father abandoned the family and he was later adopted by his mother’s new partner, a French army lieutenant stationed in Indochina.

As a troubled teen caught in the throes of moving back and forth between Vietnam and France, Sobhraj eventually turned to crime and was first imprisoned for burglary in France when he was just 19.

During his time in jail, he gained a reputation for being a conniving manipulator who curried favour with his jailers.

When he was paroled, he went to live with a volunteer at the prison who introduced him to high society. Despite this, his life of crime did not stop.

But it was during his assimilation into high society that he met an affluent young woman named Chantal, who married him after he was released from prison a second time after being caught for car theft.

Chantal eventually became pregnant in 1970 and the couple escaped from France, travelled through Eastern Europe with fake documents and robbed tourists they befriended along the way.

They finally set up home in Mumbai, India, where Sobhraj continued his life of crime and used the proceeds to fund his growing gambling addiction.

In 1973, he was jailed in India for an attempted armed robbery. Chantal helped him escape and they fled to Afghanistan where he ran a gun smuggling operation before running away again to Iran. Fed up, Chantal left him and returned to France with their child.

Sobhraj was on the run around Eastern Europe and the Middle East for the next two years, using as many as 10 stolen passports.

His crimes took a darker turn in Thailand where he charmed a young Canadian woman, Marie-Andree Leclerc, into becoming his accomplice.

Later on, he recruited a young Indian man, Anjay Chowdhury, who became his second in command. He gained a few more followers through helping them out of problems he himself had created.

Sobhraj’s first known murder took place in 1975, and his victim was a young American transiting through Thailand to reach Nepal to learn about Buddhism. Sobhraj offered to be her guide and she would later turn up on Pattaya Beach, her body burnt beyond recognition.

This was followed by the deaths of another American woman – who was found drowned in a pool in her bikini – and a young, nomadic Jewish tourist was found dead later on with his body burnt as well. The latter’s girlfriend, who had come to look for him was also murdered in her bikini, which led to Sobhraj being nicknamed ‘The Bikini Killer’.

Sobhraj also poisoned a pair of Dutch students whom he nursed back to health to gain their trust before strangling them both. Using the Dutch passports, he and Leclerc flew to Nepal, where they murdered two more travellers before returning to Thailand.

There, he found that some of his followers who had no knowledge of the murders had discovered the full extent of his crimes and wanted to come clean.

He escaped Thailand, travelling through India and Singapore, murdering people occasionally. It was at this time that Dutch authorities found evidence of his crimes against their citizens.

As he hopped around Asia, Sobhraj made a stop in Malaysia, where he orchestrated a gem heist. His second-in-command, Chowdhury, committed the theft and was seen handing the gems to Sobhraj and before disappearing. It is believed that Sobhraj had killed him.

The master criminal finally gets his comeuppance back in India during a foiled poisoning attempt, during which his intended victims overpowered him and delivered him to the Indian authorities.

He was charged and his trial was as eventful as his life; he fired and hired lawyers on a whim and went on a hunger strike to protest his prison conditions. He was spared the gallows by the Indian court but was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Again, he manipulated and charmed the guards, earning a comfortable life in prison. Other inmates called him ‘Sir Sobhraj’.

Knowing that the Thai authorities were awaiting him as soon as he was released from Indian custody, Sobhraj broke out of jail in 1986 to be recaptured in Goa and returned to New Delhi where he, as planned, was imprisoned again under harsher conditions.

By this time, Sobhraj was such a huge media sensation that he was offered deals for books and films even after his deportation to France in 1997.

However, a visit to Nepal in 2003 proved to be his downfall. Spotted in Kathmandu by a journalist who reported him to the authorities, he was arrested for two murders he had committed in 1975.

He was sentenced to life the following year and remains incarcerated there.

Criminologists believe that Sobhraj was a psychopathic killer but the motives for his crimes were different from the usual serial killer’s.

Although Sobhraj claimed that his crimes were acts of protest against Western imperialism in Asia, it was also believed that he didn’t kill people because he was violent or perverted – he just wanted to fund his lavish lifestyle.