Nepalese royal massacre

Nepalese royal massacre
The Narayanhity Royal Palace, home of the Royal Family. After Nepal was declared a federal republic, this building and its territories are being turned into museum.
Location	Narayanhity Royal Palace, Kathmandu, Nepal
Date	June 1, 2001 about 21 hrs (UTC+5:45)
Target	The Nepalese Royal Family King Birendra of Nepal
Attack type	Fratricide, patricide, sororicide, regicide, matricide, avunculicide, mass murder, murder-suicide, massacre
Deaths	10 (including the perpetrator)
Injured	5
Perpetrators	Crown Prince Dipendra

The Nepalese royal massacre occurred on Friday, June 1, 2001, at the Narayanhity Royal Palace, the former residence of the Nepalese monarchy, when Crown Prince Dipendra shot members of his family. As a result of the shooting, ten people died and five were wounded. The dead included King Birendra of Nepal and Queen Aiswarya, Dipendra's father and mother.

Overview of events

According to the official report, Dipendra had been drinking heavily and had "misbehaved" with a guest which resulted in his father King Birendra telling his son to leave the party. The drunken Dipendra was taken to his room by his brother Prince Nirajan and cousin Prince Paras.

One hour later Dipendra returned to the party dressed in army fatigue armed with an MP5K and a M16 and fired a single shot into the ceiling before turning the gun on his father King Birendra. Seconds later Dipendra shot one of his aunts. He then shot his uncle Dhirendra in the chest at point-blank range when he tried to stop Dipendra. During the carnage Prince Paras suffered slight injuries and managed to save at least three royals, including two children, by pulling a sofa over them.

During the attack, Dipendra darted in and out of the room firing shots each time. His mother Queen Aiswarya who came into the room when the first shots were fired left quickly, looking for help.

Dipendra's mother Aishwarya and his brother Nirajan confronted him in the garden of the palace where they were both shot dead. Dipendra then proceeded to a small bridge over a stream running through the palace where he shot himself.

Conspiracy theories

Many people in Nepal suspected that Gyanendra was responsible for the royal palace massacre on June 1, 2001 and blamed Dipendra so that he could assume the throne himself. Gyanendra, not as popular in the country as his brother Birendra, had been third in line to the throne before the massacre. He was out of town (in Pokhara) during the massacre and was the closest surviving relative of the king. Gyanendra's wife and son were in the room at the royal palace during the massacre. While his son Paras escaped with slight injuries, his wife was injured during the incident.

In July of 2008, Lal Bahadur Magar, a corporal in the Royal Army, claimed he witnessed the whole affair and that Prince Dipendra was the first to die. He claims that Prince Paras shot Dipendra (who was heavily drugged at the time) in Dipendra's room, and then donned his clothes and proceeded to commit the massacre himself. Prince Paras fled Nepal shortly after the palace massacre and is now living in Singapore.

Recently, a Nepali writer, Ashutosh Shrivastav, in his article published that India and Nepali political parties could jointly have committed this crime [1]. The writer has suggested Indian expansionism over Nepal as a possible conspiracy theory[2].

Feeding the rumor is the allegation that Dipendra was mortally wounded by a gunshot to the left side of the head, while Dipendra was right-handed. Some believe that this casts doubt on whether the injury was self-inflicted. Also, the bodies of the deceased were cremated very quickly after the massacre, which led many to believe that some sort of cover-up was happening.

Despite the fact that two survivors have publicly confirmed that Dipendra was doing the shooting, as was documented in a BBC documentary, many Nepali people still consider it a mystery. Recently a book has been published in Nepal named Raktakunda recounting the massacre. It looks at the incident through the eyes of one of the surviving witnesses, Queen Mother Ratna's personal maid, identified in the book as Shanta. The book, which the author says is a "historical novel", posits that two men masked as Crown Prince Dipendra fired the shots that led to the massacre. Shanta's husband, Trilochan Acharya, also a royal palace employee, was killed along with 10 royal family members, including the entire family of King Birendra. In addition to details of the Royal Massacre, Shanta alleged many other cover-ups by the Royal Family, including a claim that then-King Mahendra committed suicide.

Another conspiracy theory is that the American CIA had something to do with the massacres. [3] Before King Birendra was killed, he was considering a cease-fire between the Royal Army and the Maoists. This would run contrary to the agendas of American CIA operatives in the region , who considered the Maoists a terrorist organization and a communist threat. As soon as Gyanendra came into power, however, he heightened the Royal Army's attempts to crush the Maoists, which is what the CIA wanted. This theory is supported by the fact that the CIA was operating out of an office right next to one of Gyanendra's palaces in the months before the killings. Some people think that they trained Nepali operatives to disguise themselves as Dipendra and commit the killings. A cook who worked in the palace called home during the massacre and said that there were "many Dipendras walking around the palace" [4] that night. This cook never returned home and is still unaccounted for.

Aftermath

Dipendra was proclaimed King while in a coma but he died on June 4, 2001 after a three-day reign. Gyanendra was then appointed regent.

While Dipendra lived, Gyanendra maintained that the deaths were the result of an "accident". However, he later said that he made this claim due to "legal and constitutional hurdles", since under the constitution, and by tradition, Dipendra could not have been charged with murder had he survived. A full investigation took place and Crown Prince Dipendra was found to be responsible for the killing. Numerous conspiracy theories suggest an alternate conclusion but there is little evidence to support them.

The widely accepted motive is that Prince Dipendra was angry over a marriage dispute. Dipendra's choice of bride was Devyani Rana, daughter of Pashupati SJB Rana, a member of the Rana clan, against whom the Shah dynasty have a historic animosity. The Rana clan had served as the hereditary prime ministers of Nepal until 1951, with the title Maharaja, and the two clans have a long history of inter-marriages. All linked Dipendra's actions to a clash with his mother over his wish to marry Devyani Rana. It is also alleged that he had problems with both drugs and alcohol and, despite his affable public persona, had a cruel side to his personality.

A two-man committee comprising Keshav Prasad Upadhaya, the then-Supreme Court Chief Justice, and Taranath Ranabhat, the then-Speaker of the House of Representatives, carried out the week-long investigation into the massacre. The investigation concluded, after interviewing more than a hundred people, including eyewitnesses and palace officials, guards and staff, that Dipendra had carried out the massacre. Some critics both inside Nepal and abroad disputed the official report.

In a sense, the royal massacre was the beginning of the end of the Nepalese monarchy. It shattered the aura of Hindu mythology that had sustained the monarchy by exposing the real quarrels and factionalism within the royal families. The next king, Gyanendra, proved unable to govern the country effectively, and his aggressive attempts to fight the Maoist insurgency only led to an increase in violence and death; ironically, his imposition of absolute monarchy drove the moderate, democratic parties of Nepal into an unlikely alliance with the Maoists in opposition to him, an unlikely partnership which would lead to the Loktantra Andolan reaching a resolution in 2006 to end the monarchy on 28 May 2008, and a new peace process to commence.

Victims of the massacre

Killed

• HM King Birendra, father
• HM Queen Aiswarya, mother
• HRH Prince (later HM King) Dipendra, alleged perpetrator (suicide)
• HRH Prince Nirajan, brother
• HRH Princess Shruti, sister
• (HRH Prince) Dhirendra, King Birendra's brother who had renounced his title
• HRH Princess Jayanti, King Birendra's cousin
• HRH Princess Shanti, King Birendra's sister
• HRH Princess Sharada, King Birendra's sister
• Kumar Khadga, Princess Sharada's husband

Wounded

• HRH Princess Shova, King Birendra's sister
• Kumar Gorakh, Princess Shruti's husband
• HRH Princess Komal, Prince (now former King) Gyanendra's wife and former Queen
• Ketaki Chester, King Birendra's cousin
• HRH Prince Paras, Crown Prince, son of Gyanendra

External links

• Nepal: Murder in Palace, Maoists in Mountains (RWOR)
• Trapped in tradition (Frontline: India's National Magazine)
• Eyewitness Statements