By Xinhua,
Kathmandu : In a report released on the status of 170 disappeared people from Bardiya district in western Nepal, Nepal Office of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said 156 people were disappeared in the hands of the state and 14 in the hands of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (CPN-M).
According to The Kathmandu Post daily report Saturday, the cases investigated were of those disappeared during the conflict between December 2001 and January 2003. The purpose of the report is to restore the dignity and respect of those victims so that a process of revealing the whereabouts of victims could begin and would serve the purpose of justice, said Richard Bennett, the Nepal representative of OHCHR.
“This will also contribute to the peace process,” he said.
“There have been serious violations of international human rights law and Nepal has an obligation to investigate and reveal the full truth of what happened to those disappeared,” said Bennett,
Of the 156, the army has said that 39 of them were killed in encounters and security operations while they were trying to escape, according to Bennett.
But the report said that some of those killed in this way were actually killed in custody.
The CPN-M has admitted to killing 12 of the 14 they were responsible for enforced disappearance from Bardiya, some 390 km west of Kathmandu, the district which has the highest number of disappeared persons in the country.
However, the bodies of those killed have not been given back to the families by either party. Asked about what the army said on the status of those whose whereabouts are still unknown, the army replied that the issue was under investigation, Bennett said.
The OHCHR said in its 92-page report that 23 of the 156 were CPN-M members. At the time of arrest, 61 of them were subsistence farmers, 17 were laborers, nine were teachers and six were carpenters.
Of those disappeared in the hands of state, 21 were children aged between 14 and 17 and most of them were arrested from home and targeted because they or their family members or themselves were accused of being involved with the CPN-M.