by Kalpit Parajuli

The improvised explosive device blew up inside the ruling party’s headquarters. A second bomb was found and defused inside the Bagmati Zonal Office of the Department of Transport Management. The Hindu fundamentalist Nepal Defence Army, a group opposed to the country’s secularisation, is suspected.

Lalitpur (AsiaNews) – One bomb went off at the headquarters of the Nepali Congress (NC) party in Sanepa; no one was injured. A second explosive device was defused at the Department of Transport Management Bagmati Zonal Office in Ekantakuna. This has caused tensions to rise in Lalitpur district, some ten kilometres from Kathmandu.

Pro-Hinduism leaflets found near the NC headquarters is leading police investigators to believe that both bombs were planted by the Nepal Defence Army (NDA), a Hindu extremist group that claimed responsibility for the attack against Kathmandu’s Church of the Assumption on 23 May 2009.

The type of explosive device and modus operandi used in Sanepa and Ekantakuna were similar to those used in the attack against the Catholic church, which left three people dead.

Recently the NDA announced that it would carry out attacks against all those who promoted the secularisation of Nepal. The NC, as the main party in the ruling government, is among its top targets.

All of Nepal’s political parties condemned the attacks.

For the NC they were a “heinous crime committed against democracy and change with the ill-intent of disrupting the peace process”.

The UCPN (Maoist) described the criminal act as “cowardly.”

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• Nepal
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• secularisation