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Nepal declares curfew to contain rising protests

Nepal on Monday declared a daytime curfew and kept shoot-on-sight orders in the capital for the third consecutive day as it battled to contain nationwide protests against the king.

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KATHMANDU: Nepal on Monday declared a daytime curfew and kept shoot-on-sight orders in the capital for the third consecutive day as it battled to contain nationwide protests against the king.   

"Local authorities have imposed a curfew around Kathmandu between 11:00 am (0515 GMT) and 6:00 pm (1215 GMT)," state-run Radio Nepal said.   

Around 1,500 people defied the curfew to gather in the Kirtipur area of Kathmandu in the morning, blocking a major road with boulders. 

The peaceful crowd sang pro-democracy songs and chanted anti-royal slogans while security forces watched without intervening. 

In Gangabu on the outskirts of the city, hundreds of people staged a protest that was mainly peaceful in the morning but later turned violent, an AFP reporter said, adding that police had fired tear gas and rubber bullets at the crowd.   

Anti-royal demonstrations and hundreds of arrests were also reported elsewhere in the country, an opposition leader said. 

Rajendra Pandey, protest leader from the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist), said more than 4,000 people had protested in Dailekh district west of the capital, with about 500 arrests.   

In the popular western tourist town of Pokhara at least 150 protestors including academics and journalists were arrested during a protest in defiance of the curfew, he said.   

Thousands of protestors defied the curfew over the weekend. Hundreds were arrested and three protestors were reported killed, one east of the capital in Banepa, as security forces tried to control looting, state-run media said. 

 "Security personnel were forced to fire at demonstrators that vandalized the Banepa municipal office, Nepal Electricity Authority and the Nepal Telecom office," Rising Nepal newspaper reported.   

There was one death each in Chitwan in southwest Nepal and Pokhara.   King Gyanendra took direct control 14 months ago. Opposition parties have vowed to keep up their protests beyond the end of a four-day strike on Sunday.

Home Minister Kamal Thapa had said on Sunday the government had been forced to crackdown on the protests because they had been infiltrated by Maoist rebels.   

Since late last week the government has banned protests, imposed curfews, cut mobile telephones and rounded up hundreds of political activists.

The crackdown has been met by a wave of international criticism for Gyanendra's government.   

The Maoists entered a loose alliance with ousted political parties late last year, and the rebel leadership said in a statement on Sunday that the alliance would continue until the king is toppled. 

 They also said they would block highways across the country and destroy all statues of the royal family.   

Since the Maoists began their "people's war" in 1996, some 12,500 people have been killed in the troubled Himalayan nation.   

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