Nepali Times

2001

Rewind
2001

As the Maoist conflict intensified, a demoralised Nepal Police fought with .303 rifles. It launched ‘Romeo’ and ‘Kilo Sierra 2’ Operations to hunt Maoists, but killed and tortured a whole lot of civilians whose families then joined the guerrillas. (‘Kilo Sierra’ seemed to be accurately named because it was all about ‘killing’.)

Girija Prasad Koirala of the Nepali Congress (NC) was prime minister, trying to keep both his party and the country from splintering. The opposition UML was shutting down Kathmandu every other week, forcing people off the streets by terrorising them with arson on vehicles that defied strikes.  

Koirala himself was under pressure to resign after the CIAA implicated his party’s top figures of taking kickbacks in the lease of a Boeing 767 from Austria’s Lauda Air. He also wanted to form a separate Armed Police Force (APF) to fight the Maoists with heavier weapons. 

A worried King Birendra watched warily as feckless, corrupt politicians squabbled and the Maoist violence spread. As constitutional monarch, he was under pressure from hardliners in his family to be more decisive, and take control of the country.

On the morning of Friday 1 June 2001, the Editorial in Nepali Times was titled ‘Long Live the King’. On page 14 was a translation of a piece from Naya Sadak newspaper by Kishore Nepal titled ‘A Suitable Prince’ about Crown Prince Dipendra’s marriage prospects. It read: ‘Crown Prince Dipendra turns 31 on 27 June. It is high time he got married.’

Rewind 2001

Both articles turned out to be bizarrely prescient because that evening at 8:45PM Dipendra opened fire at a royal family dinner with several automatic weapons, killing his father the king, his mother the queen, his brother and sister, two aunts and an uncle before turning the gun on himself. 

The dead and wounded were rushed to the Military Hospital in Chhauni, from where Nepali Times carried an eye-witness account by the surgeon, Upendra Devkota, who tried to save their lives. 

Dipendra was in a coma for four days despite a bullet through his head. Nepal erupted in grief, shock and anger. Conspiracy theories flew faster than the truth. Nepali Times reported this like it would any crime story: speaking to eye witnesses, corroborating their testimonies, triple checking the facts. 

The 6 June issue headlined ‘The Kings Are Dead, Long Live the King’, on 15 June was a banner headline that many did not want to believe: ‘It Was Dipendra.’ (with a fullstop) and on 22 June the paper pieced together all the evidence with a 3D diagram of the scene of the massacre in Narayanhiti with the headline ‘Three Kings in Four Days’. 

By November, the Maoists pounced on the palace massacre to take the insurgency to the next level by attacking Royal Nepal Army bases and capturing heavy weapons, dragging the military into the war. 

While the war intensified in Nepal, the United States suffered the 9/11 attacks which was featured on page 1 with the headline ‘Kamikaze’.