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KATHMANDU: "This is going to be my last cigarette," said Shakuntala Thapa, taking a long drag on the burning cigarette held between her thin, nervous fingers. "I have sworn to stop smoking from today after Charles Sobhraj gets his final verdict."

However, the feisty lawyer's pledge made during recess before Nepal's Supreme Court was to have announced its definitive judgment on a 35-year-old murder case attributed to Charles Sobhraj, yesteryear's criminal mastermind, was doomed to fail as the judges postponed the verdict, for the third time.

Judge Ram Prasad Shah, the driving force behind the two-member bench hearing the 1975 murder case, told the packed room of lawyers and reporters, almost apologetically, that he and his colleague, Gauri Dhakal, had not been able to comprehensively study all the documents and arguments submitted by the prosecution and the defendant's lawyers and would need more time to frame their judgment. The date for the final verdict has now been fixed on July 30.

"It's mind-blowing," Sobhraj told TNN through intermediaries from the Central Jail in Kathmandu where he had been pacing his cell impatiently and scanning the local television channels since morning to get the news about his case. "There is no evidence to find me guilty and the (seven-year) court room drama has been going on on the basis of photocopies when the court should not have entertained the case at all."

According to Nepal's laws, photocopies are not admissible as evidence. Neither are books or films. Yet these have been the "evidence" with which the state flooded the judges, including two books written on Sobhraj but neither an authorised biography – The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj and Serpentine.

As per the police case, Sobhraj came in 1975 using the passport of Henricus Bintanja, a Dutch tourist he befriended and murdered in Bangkok. He then checked into two posh hotels, made the acquaintance of American Flower Child Connie Jo Bronzich, and killed her for the gems she had purchased in India.

He fled from the five-star Soaltee Hotel when police suspected him and stole away to India using the land route through Raxaul. There, he is alleged to have used the passport of another tourist he killed in Bangkok, Vitali Hakim.

But there have been no proof to support the allegations – save for two photocopies which police claim are pages from the guest registers of the Soaltee and Malla Hotels signed by "Bintanja". The signature, they claim, tallies with Charles Sobhraj's flourish in his genuine passport. The rest are statements sent by a retired Dutch diplomat with a strong but unexplained interest in the case. These statements have been presented by police as Interpol documents when they are not.

In 2003, when Sobhraj came to Kathmandu, reportedly with business plans, police arrested him and charged him with Bronzich's murder. Despite the glaring discrepancies in police statements, the Kathmandu district court found Sobhraj guilty in 2004 and the Patan Appellate Court tuned down his appeal in 2005. There have been views that given the black media picture drawn of Sobhraj, the judges feared a public backlash if they acquitted him. An earlier case of two judges being sacked for acquitting a drug baron was also regarded as having added to the pressure on the courts.

Thapa has unearthed a flood of contradicting documents to shoot down the allegations. She has hunted up the FIR filed by police in 2003 that says Bintanja came in Nepal in April 1975. "But Bronzich was murdered in December," she told TNN. "Then where did he stay all these months?" Also, Vitali Hakim, said to have been murdered in Bangkok before 1975, was alive and hale and hearty, as per his father's deposition in Indian courts. Besides, police have been unable to come up with immigration records to show that Bintanja came at all.

Though police said a foreign tourist, David Wilmoth, was an eyewitness who sat beside Sobhraj on the flight to Kathmandu from Bangkok and was ready t testify in court, they never summoned him to testify.

For that matter, they did not call any witness, including the manager of the lodge where Bronzich stayed, who was told by police in 1975 that they suspected Bronzich's companion, a Canadian called Laurent Armand Carriere, of doing away with her.

Angered by the continuous delay in Nepal's courts, Sobhraj has also moved the International Court of Justice in Geneva through the UN Human Rights Committee and the hearing is to start from July 25.