India: A Surprise Birthday Treat

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The bearded and bejeaned character sipping a drink at a bar in the coastal resort area of Goa looked like just another tourist. So too did the man who greeted him cheerily, "Hello, Charles. How are you?" The drinker reached for his revolver, and his interlocutor fell upon him and announced his arrest. Thus did Inspector Madhukar Zende, an ace Bombay detective, seize Charles Sobhraj, the international criminal who three weeks earlier had escaped from New Delhi's maximum-security Tihar Central Jail by slipping his guards drugged candies during a mock birthday party.

In returning Sobhraj to justice last week, Zende, who had caught the suspected murderer in 1972, served a kind of poetic justice. The day Sobhraj was arrested was the fugitive's birthday.