KATHMANDU, Aug 12: Charles Sobhraj, the infamous serial killer of Western backpackers in Asia in the 1970s, was sentenced on Thursday to life in Nepal over the death of an American woman in 1975.

The 60-year-old French national, who was nicknamed "The Serpent" for his cunning escapes from the law and who resurfaced last year when he was arrested at a Kathmandu casino, said he would appeal the verdict.

"I have been declared guilty without proof and without witnesses," Sobhraj, wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap, told reporters at the end of the three-hour hearing.

Sobhraj, who was freed in 1997 after 21 years in prison in India, was sentenced to life in jail by Kathmandu District Judge, who said any property Sobhraj owned in Nepal would be seized.

Court registrar B.B. Bastola said Sobhraj was found guilty of killing US tourist Connie Bronizch, whose charred remains were discovered in 1975 during the heyday of the Kathmandu hippie scene.

Sobhraj has also been accused of the murder the same year in Kathmandu of Canadian hiker Laurent Armand Carrierre, but that killing came under the jurisdiction of a separate court in the Kathmandu suburb of Bhaktapur. Sobhraj has the right to appeal. Nepal does not have the death penalty.

Born in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, to an Indian father and Vietnamese mother who remarried a Frenchman, Sobhraj allegedly left Nepal after the 1975 killings using a false passport. -AFP