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Nepali politician from pro-royalty party shot

A politician who ran in last week’s election for a constitutional assembly as a candidate from a party that supports Nepal’s discredited king was fatally shot yesterday in a southern village, police said.

Several men burst into the home of Rudra Bahadur Singh early in the morning and shot him in the stomach, local police chief Sushil Bhandari said.

Bhandari said police were investigating the shooting in Parasi village, about 200km southwest of Kathmandu, but had no suspects.

Singh was a candidate from the Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal, the only group which openly supported the king in the April 10 election for a Constituent Assembly, which will draft a new constitution for the country.

The main political parties agreed before the election that Nepal’s centuries-old monarchy will be abolished by the assembly at its first meeting.

King Gyanendra is highly unpopular and his followers are often harassed by supporters of other political parties.

Pro-democracy protests in April 2006 forced Gyanendra to give up his authoritarian rule and command of the army. Since then he has lost all his powers and palaces.

With election results from 221 constituencies counted, former communist rebels now known as the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) have won 116 directly elected seats, followed by the Nepali Congress party with 34 seats and the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) with 31.

The Madhesi People’s Rights Forum, which has been seeking autonomy and greater rights for people in southern Nepal, won 24 seats. The party was formed last year.

Final results for the 601-seat Constituent Assembly are still a few weeks off, with re-polling ordered in some districts.

A total of 240 members of the assembly are directly elected, while another 335 are selected through a system in which political parties are given seats in proportion to the percentage of votes they received. Twenty-six other members are nominated by the government.

The former rebels appear almost certain to capture more than half of the 240 directly elected seats and are doing well in the early count for the 335 proportional representation seats.

In that tally, they have garnered about 2.3 million votes of the 7 million counted so far. The Nepali Congress has 1.6 million and the United Marxist-Leninists 1.5 million. About 10.5 million proportional representation ballots were cast.

Nepal’s 10-year communist insurgency ended in 2006 when the rebels agreed to join the political mainstream. The US still considers them a terrorist organization.
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