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Nepal's parliament elected former Maoist rebel chief Prachanda, who led a decade-long insurgency that toppled a Hindu monarchy, as prime minister on Wednesday after predecessor KP Oli resigned rather than face defeat in a vote of no confidence. Pushpa Kamal Dahal, 61, who still uses a nom de guerre that means "Fierce", won 363 votes out of the 573 cast in the 595-member parliament, Speaker Onsari Gharti said. He becomes the 24th prime minister in 26 years since the Himalayan nation adopted multi-party democracy in 1990 and the eighth since the 239-year-old monarchy was abolished eight years ago. ...Political change...

KATHMANDU: Battling for the removal of the controversial army chief, Gen Rookmangud Katawal, and his defender, President Ram Baran Yadav, Nepal's Maoist party walked into an ambush when an embarrassing video tape showed Maoist Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda boasting his guerrilla troops' number had been five-fold inflated during a UN count. In the same video, aired by Nepal's gleeful public television stations on Tuesday night, he was also shown as making scathing remarks about "reactionary" India and the US, saying that if they scented the constituent assembly election would lead to a Maoist victory, they would never allow...

When they fought their 10-year 'People's War' inspired by Chinese leader Mao Zedong's teaching that power comes "out of the barrels of a gun", Nepal's Maoist guerrillas were condemned by Beijing for "bringing disrepute" to their great leader. But now Maoist supremo Prachanda's son is on a China tour on the invitation of the country's intellectuals. Ever since the insurgents made their peace with the Nepal government and became a dominant partner in the ruling coalition, Beijing has been doing some quick re-thinking on its Maoist policy. As a sign of that, the son of Maoist supremo Prachanda Thursday flew...

KATHMANDU: The top two leaders of Nepal's Maoist party are currently in eastern India, media reports in Kathmandu said. Pushpa Kamal Dahal, alias Prachanda, chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist as well as supreme commander of the rebels' guerrilla army, the People's Liberation Army, and his deputy, architect-turned rebel Baburam Bhattarai, arrived in Siliguri town in West Bengal Friday evening, Nepali newspapers said on Saturday. After a brief halt in Jhapa district in eastern Nepal, on the India-Nepal border, where they held consultations with party leaders, the rebel leaders headed for Siliguri. Accompanying them are senior leader of the...

Kathmandu : Nepal's Maoist guerrillas took advantage of the ceasefire called by them in September to buy arms from India, the official media here reported Friday. The Rising Nepal daily, the mouthpiece of the government headed by King Gyanendra, said the information was given to the Royal Nepalese Army by an ex-Maoist "combatant". The informer, the daily said, was a 13-year-old girl from Ilam district in eastern Nepal. Ishwara Neupane aka Richa, who reportedly surrendered to security forces and was presented at a press conference at the district administration office in Jhapa, also in eastern Nepal, was quoted as saying...

JALPAIGURI (Indo-Nepal-Bhutan-Bangladesh Border), July 24: Over 165 Maoist cadres are being trained in Bhutan at present, as Bhutan has been included in the future Maoist country, ‘Dandkaranya Desam’. The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) and Kamtapur Liberation Organization (KLO) are imparting the training. A senior leader of the Standing Committee of a Maoist outfit confirmed this to the South Asia Tribune.

In Nepal's eight-year war with Maoist guerrillas, no group has been harder hit than the police. They have lost more than 1,200 of their number. The police consistently suffer more casualties than the army, who were not used at all against the Maoists for the first five years of the conflict. To find out more about what the police have been through, I travelled to the isolated town of Beni, where memories of a recent bloody ordeal are raw. This district headquarters in west-central Nepal stands in rugged country at the bottom of a gorge. Less than six months ago,...

NAGANDA DHIKUR POKHARI, Nepal (Reuters) - He was an average, unremarkable student, well behaved and polite to his elders in his small village in the mountains of western Nepal. Now, four decades later, his first teacher suggests his former pupil should learn to play better with others -- and stop destroying the country. The elusive "Prachanda" - loosely, "awesome" or "majestically terrible" -- who leads Nepal's Maoist revolutionaries learned to read and write at the age of nine in the harsh Kaski area below the Himalayas here in western Nepal. "He was just a normal child for his age --...