- Related story: She fears husband´s martyrdom might prove meaningless
Police had blocked the area to prevent protestors, who had turned out in large numbers, from moving further. Army tanks were also deployed. [break]
It was peaceful until a few irate youths pelted stones at the police broking window panes of Nepal Telecom office nearby. This provoked the police to baton charge, while the army started firing aerial shots.
It was around 1:30 and the soldiers on duty at the telecom office fired three rounds of bullets even as the crowd had dispersed after the police resorted to force. Two of the bullets fired hit the shutter of a store while another hit Bhimsen Dahal of Ugrachandi, Kavre who was walking in the street.
“I saw Dahal falling over amidst the sound of gunshots,” Januka Adhikari of Batulechaur reminisces, adding she pretended not to be a participant to avoid police ire. “I screamed when I saw that a fellow protestor had been shot at. No body could have heard me amidst the chaos as the police was chasing everybody,” Adhikari adds.
She hurried toward Dahal. Another demonstrator Kalidas Sharma also reached there and took Dahal in his arms. Dahal had been hit behind his ear. “He was drenched in a pool of blood when I reached there. I didn´t even have the presence of mind to try to stop the bleeding,” she rues.
Adhikari started to swear at the soldiers. By then Dahal had already breathed his last. He had become the first martyr of Janaandolan II just two days after it started on April 6.
Police stopped using batons after realizing that a protestor had been shot dead and returned to the intersection. It was hard to identify the dead at first and many took him to be Adhikari´s son.
Soon his identity was revealed. He ran a cyber café at Prithvi Chowk and had been participating in the protests from the first day of April uprising. He was there with his second wife Sabita.
Police didn´t allow the demonstrators to pick up the dead body and even sent back an ambulance. “Army took the body away in their own vehicle after the police hesitated for around 15 minutes,” Shekhar Gautam, an eyewitness, said.
The protestors had tried to prevent the army from taking away the body but to no avail. “We feared that the body would be disappeared,” Adhikari reveals. There was more destruction in the place after Dahal´s death as the protestors had turned angry. They planned to organize a mass funeral procession the next day but the army flew the body to Dahal´s home in Kavre.
The place of Mahendrapul where Dahal was shot dead has now been named Bhimsen Chowk but nobody remembered him on the day of his martyrdom. Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) celebrated the Janaandolan Day at its party office but nobody cared to visit the monument just a couple of kilometers away.
Related story
Two Pakistani soldiers killed during exchange of fire in Khyber...
