A second general strike in three days brought much of Nepal to a halt Monday as protestors blocked roads and torched cars over the prison killing of a senior opposition party activist. The opposition-called strike closed businesses across the country as protestors on major highways enforced a ban on road traffic by attacking cars and burning tyres.
"We arrested 27 protesters, most in Kathmandu, and a coffee shop and five vehicles were damaged in the capital," police spokesman Binod Singh said. In towns throughout the country, government offices, banks and vehicles were vandalised, he said. A local television station reported that thousands of people were stranded at a major road access point to Kathmandu, where buses were being denied entry.
The strike organised by the Nepali Congress (NC) party followed a similar stoppage on Saturday that also saw shops vandalised and vehicles torched across the country. The United States warned Sunday that the action could lead to Nepal's travel warning being reinstated. The UN's chief representative in Nepal, Robert Piper, tweeted Monday about what he described as "a coercive, enforced stoppage."
"Using bandhas (strikes) to seek redress, & the trigger for this one - a murder in custody of an NC cadre - more evidence of weak rule of law in Nepal," he wrote. Shiva Poudel, chairman of a party youth wing, was critically injured when a group of inmates attacked him in a prison in the southern district of Chitwan on December 6 and he died in Kathmandu on Saturday.
Hundreds of riot police brandishing wooden batons and shields patrolled the streets of Kathmandu on Monday. Nepal's civil war ended in 2006 after a decade of fighting that killed some 16,000 people, but the country has remained unstable due to political squabbling over the terms of the peace process.