Thaindian News

Kathmandu, June 9 (IANS) Five years after a civil war ended in Nepal, terror still continues to stalk the uneasy republic, as the panic triggered by the discovery of two abandoned suitcases in the capital city Thursday proved.

Traffic was suspended in the Panipokhari area, leading to the residence and office of Nepal’s President Ram Baran Yadav, for several hours after a suitcase was found dumped on the main road, close to a cluster of shops.

Alarmed residents informed police who sent a bomb disposal team to investigate.

The area was cordoned off and traffic suspended as the bomb disposal team blew up the suitcase.

After part of the lid was blown away, a policeman wearing protective clothing gingerly approached the suspicious suitcase and with a rod and began to pull out the stuff inside.

The contents proved to be an anti-climax: black plastic bags filled with kitchen garbage.

Earlier during the day, police had come across another abandoned suitcase in the Balaju area of the city and undergone a similar exercise with the blown open suitcase yielding an old pressure cooker.

The panic comes as Nepal is poised to demolish the last of the mines laid by the Nepal Army in the course of the 10-year Maoist insurgency.

During the “People’s War”, the Nepal Army laid mines in 53 areas and all but one were cleaned up in a long and expensive operation that began with the help of the UN in 2007, after the signing of a peace pact in 2006.

The anti-personnel mines, mostly of Soviet-make and bought from dealers abroad, were laid around army barracks and major installations like telecom towers and hydropower projects to protect them from attacks by the Maoists’ People’s Liberation Army.

Though the peace pact agreed that both the army and Maoists would undertake the destruction of their explosives within 60 days of signing the peace accord, the last land mine planted by the army would be formally destroyed on Tuesday.

The Maoists fought the insurgency mostly with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) manufactured with explosives smuggled from India across the border.

They handed over more than 52,000 IEDs after the war ended and the stockpile was eventually destroyed under UN supervision.

However, government officials concede that new armed groups and criminal gangs are mushrooming, especially in the southern plains, and IEDs continue to be planted by them, killing civilians.

Children under 14 years continue to bear the brunt of the IEDs, comprising 53 percent of the casualties.

Police have been on high alert in the capital this year after the revelation that a Hindu militant, arrested for masterminding the bombing of a church and several mosques, had been plotting bomb attacks on public places from his prison cell in Kathmandu.