By IANS
Kathmandu : As several districts in Nepal's trouble-prone Terai belt Friday reeled under a closure called by an ethnic group to protest Maoist "atrocities", there was added tension in a frontier district as unidentified attackers shot a government officer – the second in less than a week.
Kailash Chaudhary, an official of the state-run Agriculture Research Centre in Parwanipur town in Bara district, was shot in the head Friday afternoon at his office by three men who came on a motorcycle.
Earlier this week, an overseer was killed in the Terai region by a group of former Maoists, triggering protests by enraged civil servants.
Though no one has claimed responsibility for Chaudhury's murder, it is believed to be the handiwork of one of the two factions of former Maoists, including the Janatantrik Terai Mukti Morcha that has been spreading terror in the plains since this year.
East and central Terai were hard hit Friday by the shutdown enforced by another rising group in the plains, the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum.
Volatile Rautahat district, where 29 people were killed after clashes between the forum and Maoists, Bara, Parsa, Siraha, Sunsari, Dhanusha, Saptarai, Sarlahi and Mahottari districts lay paralysed.
Schools, markets and business establishments remained closed and long-distance transport was badly hit.
The forum called the protest to retaliate to the kidnapping of its cadre, Jitendra Shah, in Kathmandu.
It alleges that Shah was abducted from Koteshwor, a busy area in the capital, by the Young Communist League (YCL), the controversial youth wing of the Maoists that has become a byword for its strong-arm tactics.
This week, forum leaders met Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala and urged him to ban the YCL as well as remove the Maoists from the government. The government, however, has said it has no plans to ban the YCL.
Since the forum shot into prominence this year with its agitation in the Terai for an autonomous state for plains people, it has become the biggest challenge to the Maoists in the plains.
Subsequently, the forum's programmes and mass meetings began to come under attack from Maoists, finally resulting in the Rautahat carnage in which the Maoists suffered severe casualties.
With the forum having applied for recognition as a political party, it is likely to give the Maoists as well as the other ruling parties a run for their money in the south.