Her new client is called «the snake». Her most prominent is called “the jackal”, and she married him. But more on that later. The snake is Charles Sobhraj, the French serial killer who was released from prison in Nepal on December 23, ostensibly for good behavior and health reasons, but his lawyer, of course, knows better.
The health reasons, says Isabelle Coutant-Peyre shortly before his arrival in Paris, were just a pretext, the real reason is that the Nepalese authorities have finally realized that 78-year-old Sobhraj has wrongly spent so many years of his life in prison. have issued. Because of everything we thought we knew about Sobhraj, at most “30 percent” was true.
By “everything,” she means the BBC series “The Serpent,” which is still on Netflix, the story of a man whose only profession was crime, and who lived in Asia, mainly Thailand, at least in the 1970s poisoned , strangled or burned twenty tourists. He traveled the world on the forged passports of the dead and pliable companions, bribed prison guards with jewels, and was the prototypical stone-cold, super-slick charisma that true crime drama makers love.
In 1976, he drugged a busload of tourists in India and was arrested for it. When his release was imminent after ten years, he was threatened with extradition to Thailand and with it certain execution. He therefore extended his detention by drugging guards and fellow prisoners, left the prison and was imprisoned again a short time later. He was released in 1997, his murders in Thailand were now time-barred, he lived in France for a while, sold the rights to his story for a lot of money and then made the mistake of traveling to Nepal, where he is still wanted. for two murders. And so he spent the last 19 years in prison again.
It makes sense that Isabelle Coutant-Peyre now wants to defend him against the BBC and Netflix. The lawyer loves the super bad guys. All you need to do is use the correct code word. It says: fight against Western imperialism. Sobhraj, the Frenchman with a Vietnamese mother and an Indian father, explained each of his murders of American or European backpackers as a struggle against Western imperialism.
Coutant-Peyre has also defended an RAF member and hit man involved in the 9/11 attacks and the editorial office of Charlie Hébdo. The Gaddafi family has also asked for their services. But above all, she was the lawyer of the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos, the ‘jackal’, who had converted to Islam. So by Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, who claims to be responsible for more than 1,500 victims in the name of the Palestinian liberation struggle. For dozens dead and hundreds injured. Coutant-Peyre’s client base comes from the incandescent core of hell.
In 1975, Carlos is the mastermind behind the hostage taking at the OPEC conference in Vienna. Before Osama bin Laden, Carlos was the most wanted criminal in the world. For Coutant-Peyre, he is a rebel, a revolutionary and a romantic. His hostages deserved the terror. His dead died for good reasons.
In 1994 he was arrested in Sudan and extradited to France. In 1997 she joined his legal team. That was arranged by her colleague Jacques Vergès, whose clients include the German Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and the Serbian Slobodan Milošević. When Coutant-Peyre meets Carlos for the first time, lightning strikes. Anyway, as she describes it in her 2004 autobiography, Epouser Carlos: Un Amour sous Haute Tension (Marrying Carlos: A Love Under High Tension), she said, “He took my hand and kissed it in the most polite way. At that moment, a wave of recognition went back and forth between us.”
The two decide to get married in 2001, a few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center. The fall of the phallic symbols of Western imperialism inspires them. And although she regularly loses court cases with her hopeless clients, she is sure that she will finally accomplish the miracle, she just doesn’t know when. She clearly sees Carlos as the future president of Venezuela. But first she must divorce her husband and he must divorce his first wife, former German RAF activist Magdalena Kopp. And then there is his second wife, a Sudanese, but she has not been found for a long time. Carlos is 52 and Coutant Peyre is 48.
Finally, in 2000, “the barriers between us have fallen and the strength of our feelings for each other has been revealed.” Her three children don’t care who Maman marries, their parents are shocked. Isabelle Coutant-Peyre grew up with her three brothers and their father, a successful businessman, had three sons and works with men like Vergès. That made her hard, she says. Hardness she can. And she radicalises. As an anti-imperialist, anti-feminist, anti-Semitist. And always against the French state. French journalist Judith Perrignon, who met Coutant-Peyre and Carlos in 2001, described the chain-smoker as “a crop full of thorns”.
Marrying an inmate who spends years in solitary confinement in a maximum security prison, she says, is largely sexless. This, of course, is precisely what interests the French press most. “I came up with the perfect answer. I say I have an ideal husband because he leaves me alone all night,” she said in a 2004 interview.
In return, he writes her glowing love letters, which she of course publishes in her book: “I am jealous of the sun that colors you,” it says, “of the shade that caresses you; of your sheets that do not cover me. On your legs, which are not intertwined with mine.”
The two are still married to this day. Their love, it is said, has now grown cold. It is entirely possible that Charles Sobhraj, whose excellent physical condition Coutant-Peyre is now raving about, will succeed in sparking another.
Source: Blick
I am Dawid Malan, a news reporter for 24 Instant News. I specialize in celebrity and entertainment news, writing stories that capture the attention of readers from all walks of life. My work has been featured in some of the world’s leading publications and I am passionate about delivering quality content to my readers.
