Sacked Nepal Prime Minister held on graft charges

KATHMANDU - Former Nepal Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba was arrested on Wednesday for refusing to appear before an anti-graft panel to answer allegations of corruption, police said.

The arrest came just four days before the scheduled end of emergency rule imposed by King Gyanendra after he sacked Deuba's government on Feb. 1 for failing to quell a nine-year-old Maoist rebellion in which 11,000 people have been killed.

Deuba was taken from his home in Kathmandu after midnight in a police car, officials said.

"Some members of the family tried to stop the police from arresting him," a police official said.

Deuba had refused a summons from the Royal Commission for Corruption Control, which wanted to question him about the distribution of public funds and the choice of contractors for a water project.

The Royalist government has freed more than 500 activists arrested since the imposition of the emergency, but political leaders said hundreds were still being held and police were making fresh arrests in the impoverished Himalayan kingdom.

"We don't know where he is being kept," Deuba's aide and spokesman of his Nepali Congress (Democratic) party, Minendra Rijal, told Reuters.

Rijal said dozens of policemen broke open the gate of Deuba's house in the middle of the night, cut off electricity and telephone lines and arrested him.

"This is inhuman," he added.

An official said the anti-graft body wanted to question Deuba about the alleged distribution of $77,000 of state funds to party workers during the Hindu festival of Dasain last October.

The panel, armed with sweeping powers to jail politicians and bureaucrats found guilty of tax evasion, smuggling and bribery, has already arrested a senior minister facing the same charges.

Deuba denies the allegations, saying they were aimed at slandering political leaders because they had opposed Gyanendra's power grab.

Gyanendra set up the commission saying he wanted to fight widespread corruption in Nepal, one of the world's poorest countries.

Gyanendra, who is on a visit to Singapore after going to China and Indonesia, says the declaration of emergency was needed to crush the Maoist revolt. The move also included the arrest of political leaders and suspension of civil liberties.

The Maoist rebels, inspired by the teaching of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, want to establish a communist republic in the picturesque nation, home to eight of the world's 14 highest mountains, including Mount Everest.

- REUTERS