Sobhraj

Kathmandu, July 3: The “Serpent” has found his Eve and has fallen — in love.

Sixty-four-year-old Charles Sobhraj has got “engaged” to a 20-year-old Nepalese belle in a winter-spring romance that blossomed in a Kathmandu prison, where the man once dubbed “Bikini Killer” is serving a life term for murder.

“I met her just two months ago and now we are in love, and I hope we will marry after I get released,” Sobhraj, also named “Serpent” by the tabloid press, told PTI from Central Jail.

It was not clear how the agency got access to the celebrity criminal, convicted in July 2004 for murdering an American and a Canadian in 1975.

Neha alias Nihita Bishwas, the apple of Sobhraj’s eye, is neither bothered by the age difference nor her fiancé’s criminal past.

“I don’t know what he was,” she was quoted as saying in a report by India Abroad News Service. “But I know what he is now. He is a good and caring man and that’s what’s important.”

Central Jail officials said Neha, who has a Nepalese mother and a Bengali father, met Sobhraj while he was looking for an interpreter a few months back.

Neha took her mother to the prison to meet Sobhraj.

“My daughter is an adult and free to decide whom to marry,” her mother told reporters. “If she is happy then I am happy, too.”

Sobhraj, who says there was “no evidence” and “no eyewitness” to convict him, believes he will be released soon, with the Nepal Supreme Court set for a final hearing on his appeal next week.

If that happens, the lovers are planning a western marriage in Paris, where Sobhraj had been deported from India.

But not everyone believes the “Serpent” is in love. Sources said this could just be a ploy to win the sympathy of Nepalis.