Nepal's human rights commission said yesterday it had found what may be a burial or cremation site of civilians who disappeared during the country's decade-long war against Maoist rebels.
A team, including representation from the UN human rights agency, found half-burned logs, partially buried pieces of clothes and plastic bags on a forested slope in the army-protected Shivapuri National Park, 15km north of Kathmandu.
"People might have been killed somewhere else and buried or cremated here, or they might have been brought and killed here," said Gauri Pradhan, who visited the site as a member of the government's National Human Rights Commission (NHRC).
"This is a suspicious location," he said, without giving details.
The team did not dig or otherwise disturb the site, and no human remains have yet been found. Both NHRC and the local branch of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) have urged the government to seal off the site, preserve evidence and investigate.
"Failure to do so jeopardizes the rights of victims to know the truth and to receive justice and reparation," OHCHR said in a statement.
Hundreds of civilians went missing during Nepal's Maoist rebellion, which ended a year ago. Human-rights activists say both Maoist rebels and Nepal's army captured people on suspicion of being enemy informants or sympathisers, and some may have been tortured or even killed.
The NHRC said it was told about the site by relatives of some of the 49 people who disappeared from army barracks in Kathmandu in 2003, an incident the OHCHR had said needed investigation.
An army spokesman was not available to comment. In the past, the military has said more than 100 Nepali soldiers and junior officers had been punished for human rights abuses committed while fighting the Maoists.
Meanwhile, police have arrested at least 110 members of armed minority groups in a crackdown aimed at curbing months of unrest in the south, officials said yesterday.
A sweep of the groups' hideouts began Dec. 1 in eight districts where tensions have persisted since early this year, the police headquarters in Kathmandu, said in a statement.
Minority groups have been organizing demonstrations, strikes and transportation shutdowns in southern Nepal to demand greater recognition of their rights. Many of these groups have armed members.
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement
RSS