Kathmandu, June 25 (Inditop.com) Public protests continued to snowball in capital city Kathmandu Thursday with outraged students demanding that the Indian teacher charged with the brutal murder of a teenaged student be hanged.
“Bring him to justice and hang him,” chanted school and high school students in unison as they took out a rally through the heart of the city, holding aloft photographs of Khyati Shrestha, the 19-year-old student of Jubilant College and Research Centre, whose body parts were strewn in different areas by her former tutor and landlord Biren Pradhan, a 42-year-old from India’s Darjeeling town.
The protesters marched in Basantapur, the site of an old palace and a favourite spot for public protests. It was also the area where Pradhan is being held by police since his arrest, along with a teenaged accomplice, Sunday.
As the administration deployed police contingents to prevent the situation from turning angry, more rallies were taken out in other parts of the capital by the student union affiliated to the ruling Nepali Congress party and several women’s organisations.
Public outrage continued to escalate four days after Pradhan’s arrest with the discovery of the missing 12th grader’s decomposed head from a forest in the Balaju area of the capital Wednesday.
Earlier, her headless and leg and armless torso had been found in Lalitpur district and parts of her hands in Chitwan district while her legs, chopped up into smaller pieces, were found in a different part of Kathmandu.
Police also recovered part of the NRS 10 million ransom Pradhan had obtained from the girl’s parents, more than a week after he had killed her.
While some of the money was found in a deposit account the Indian had with a private financial company, part of it was discovered hidden among the textbooks of his 16-year-old accomplice, a student who had appeared for her school-leaving examination.
The accomplice had been a student of Adarsha Vidya Mandir, a well-known secondary school where Pradhan had been employed as a biology teacher for 14 years.
Police said Pradhan, going by the brutality of his crime and lack of remorse, could have committed other crimes in the past. Investigations were also on to unearth if he had any other accomplice.
An inveterate gambler, the Indian, who also worked as a real estate agent, was said to have been a regular at the city’s casinos. He lured away Khyati to his apartment in the city, where he lived alone, pretending that she had been selected by a women’s magazine for a cash award and an all-expenses paid trip to Pokhara city and would have to fill a form to accept the freebies.
After cutting up her body, he kept the parts in his fridge before taking them out in his motorcycle and scattering them in different areas to hide detection. Her head was found in a carton.
Pradhan was arrested after Khyati’s mother, who had gone to the India-Nepal border to pay the ransom, came across him and grew suspicious.
Pradhan reportedly told police during interrogation that he had arrived from Darjeeling about 15 years ago and was a graduate from Darjeeling’s famous St Joseph’s College.
Though Nepal has abolished the death penalty and murder is punishable with up to 20 years in prison, the teenager’s murder has triggered a public cry for the re-introduction of death penalty when Nepal implements a new constitution next year.
The Nagarik daily Thursday was flooded with letters asking for a review of the international treaties signed by Nepal that agree to abolish capital punishment.
Ramesh Karki, a Kathmandu lawyer and member of the district bar association, said the growing lawlessness and brutal attacks on women should make the lawmakers review Nepal’s position on abolishing death penalty.
“Other countries have laws to punish the guilty with death,” said Khadga Bahadur Magar from Udaypur district. “If people who commit murder, violence, rape, robbery and kidnappings are given capital punishment, it would cause crimes to go down.”
Even as Kathmandu continued to seethe over the abduction and murder, a first grader was kidnapped from his school Thursday.
Shuvlal Rana, a student of Ganesh Baba Boarding School in remote Kanchanpur district, was abducted during lunch break from the school by a couple of men riding a motorcycle, who lured him out with biscuits, police said.
