By IANS,
Kathmandu : Eight tumultuous years after the massacre of Nepal’s king Birendra and his entire family in the tightly guarded royal palace, fresh theories are still surfacing in this country about who plotted the bloodbath.
Earlier this month, a mild-mannered bespectacled man called Tul Prasad Sherchan walked into Nepal’s best known media club to announce that he had killed the king for defying his warning. The 65-year-old claimed he had warned Birendra and his family not to divert the foreign aid meant for the development of the country into family bank accounts abroad.
Now a former royalist minister has come up with a new theory for the royal assassination.
Durga Pokhrel, former women, children and social welfare minister, last week created a sensation by claiming in Nepali Jana Aastha weekly that Girija Prasad Koirala, former Nepali prime minister and architect of the peace pact with the Maoists, had plotted in the past to kidnap the then crown prince Dipendra.
“It was an absolutely planned assassination,” Durga Pokhrel told IANS. “And the government was well aware of the conspiracy.”
Pokhrel, former head of the National Women’s Commission and once member of Koirala’s Nepali Congress party, is holding the veteran politician responsible for the carnage in which the king, queen Aishwarya and eight more royals were killed during a traditional family dinner.
“Koirala was both prime minister and defence minister at that time,” Pokhrel said. “When the government knew even what a man on the street was doing, how could it not be aware of what was going on in the palace?”
Pokhrel fell out with her party in 2005 when she was appointed minister by King Gyanendra, Birendra’s younger brother who ascended the throne after his murder. The Nepali Congress, which was opposing Gyanendra’s army-backed coup and grabbing of absolute power, expelled Pokhrel.
The former minister also claims there are witnesses who can bear out that Birendra’s son Dipendra, who was blamed for the massacre, was innocent.
“As he lay dying after being shot, Nirajan, Dipendra’s younger brother, called up a close friend of mine,” Pokhrel said. “The dying prince said: There is trouble afoot in the palace. A lot of people are shooting at us. But I don’t know who they are.
“Would the prince have said that had it been his own brother Dipendra who was pulling the trigger?”
Pokhrel also claimed that she knew Dipendra very well and could vouchsafe that he was incapable of the massacre, even under the influence of alcohol.
The former minister is asking why Koirala did not resign after the killings since he was morally bound to do so after having failed to protect the king both as head of the government and of security agencies.
In the past, Pokhrel, who has a chequered history herself, had written a book, “Shadow over Shangri-la”, about her experiences as a political prisoner in the 1980s.
At that time, she did not name many of the people mentioned in her book. But now, she is toying with the idea of rectifying the omissions — either in a new book or in a revised version of her old memoir.