Two dead as Nepal police use tear gas sticks to break up pro monarchy rally

KATHMANDU – Nepali riot police lobbed tear gas, fired water cannon and used rattan sticks on March 28 to break up a protest rally demanding the restoration of constitutional monarchy, and at least two people were killed in the violence, police said.

The authorities said they had to use force to stop thousands of protesters breaking into an area where demonstrations and protest rallies are banned, and they later imposed a curfew in the affected area to stem further escalation of the violence.

The two people killed included one of the protesters and a journalist who was covering the rally, police spokesman Dinesh Kumar Acharya told Reuters. Avenues TV said one of its journalists had died when a house he was in was set ablaze.

Another Nepal police spokesman, Mr Shekhar Khanal, said protesters had set fire to a private house and a vehicle, adding that 17 people including three police officers were injured. Three protesters are in police custody, he said.

A separate anti-monarchy rally also took place in the Nepali capital on March 28 but passed peacefully.

A specially elected assembly scrapped the 239-year-old monarchy in 2008, under an accord that ended a Maoist insurgency – which had killed 17,000 people between 1996 and 2006 – and turned Nepal into a secular, federal republic from a Hindu kingdom.

The last king of the Himalayan nation, 77-year-old Gyanendra, has lived with his family in a private house in Kathmandu as a commoner since being toppled.

‘Unruly’ crowd

The March 28 trouble erupted when thousands of demonstrators, some carrying Nepal’s national flag, hurled stones and tried to break a barricade in order to march towards the Parliament building in central Kathmandu.

Police official Kumar Neupane said police fired in the air to drive away the “unruly” crowd.

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