By IANS
Kathmandu : All hospitals in Nepal shut down Wednesday to protest the government’s failure to punish Maoist cadres responsible for the abduction and assault of five employees of a medical college including a doctor.
All medical services except emergency services were stopped countrywide as enraged doctors said that despite being directed by Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala, the home ministry had failed to apprehend the Maoists who had abducted and roughed up officials of the private Nobel Medical College last month.
The college hit the headlines in November after a dispute between partners.
One of the feuding partners, who was sacked from the college, allegedly approached the Maoists for help.
The Young Communist League, the feared youth wing of the Maoists, abducted five officials from the Kathmandu airport and held them captive for a day on the outskirts of the valley during which they were roughed up.
The incident created a furore, coming close on the heels of the Maoists owing responsibility for the abduction and murder of a journalist in south Nepal.
Koirala asked Home Minister Krishna Prasad Sitaula to bring the perpetrators to justice.
However, alleging that the minister had done nothing even after a week, furious doctors struck work Wednesday nationwide.
Despite reports that the Maoists are close to reaching an understanding with the government and are likely to return to the cabinet they left in September, tales of the rebels violating the peace accord have been pouring in.
Recently, the rebels assaulted a Swiss trekker for refusing to pay them money, the first such recorded assault of a foreigner by the guerrillas who in the course of their decade-old uprising had allowed tourists to go unhindered.
On Tuesday night, police arrested a Maoist leader, Devendra Poudel, with arms in Samakhushi area of the capital.
The gun Poudel was carrying had a UN sticker, indicating it was registered by the UN Mission in Nepal supervising the arms and combatants of the Maoists and that the weapon had been handed over to the agency to be locked up.
Though Poudel was released, police said they had kept the gun and would hand it over only to UNMIN authorities.
Poudel’s arrest came on the day the government formed a three-member team headed by Sitaula to report within 72 hours if the peace accord had been violated.