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Nepal police fire on rioters, kill one

Police opened fire on rampaging protesters in western Nepal yesterday, killing at least one of them a day ahead of a landmark election to chart the country’s political future, officials said.

The protesters, enraged by the slaying of a candidate a day earlier, began smashing stores and vandalizing buses in the mountainous Surkhet district, prompting police to fire at them with live ammunition, the area’s police chief, Ram Kumar Khanal, said..

The protesters were defying a curfew imposed in the area following the killing Tuesday of the candidate, Khanal said.

One of the protesters was killed yesterday, he said.

Voting in the area also was suspended, although the rest of Nepal will hold the election as planned today. The polls are meant to cement a peace deal with communist rebels and elect a so-called Constituent Assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution.

The campaign has been repeatedly marred by violence, with the UN blaming the majority of incidents on the Maoists, who fought a decade-long rebellion that left some 13,000 people dead.

The slain candidate, Rishi Prasad Sharma, was a candidate of the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist), a political party that rivals the Maoists. Police have not yet said whom they suspect of killing Sharma.

Authorities plan to select a new polling date for the constituency where Sharma was killed about 500km west of Kathmandu.

Violence and protests in the past year have already forced two delays in the elections, the first since King Gyanendra was forced to end his royal dictatorship by widespread unrest nearly two years ago and the Maoists declared a truce.

On Tuesday, six former rebels were killed in clashes with police in the southwestern town of Satbaria, after the ex-rebels tried to attack a former minister, police said.
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