A MEMBER of Nepal's royal family identified the former heir to the throne as a multiple murderer for the first time yesterday.
The brother of the murdered Queen Aishwarya blamed Crown Prince Dipendra for the massacre of his father, King Birendra, and nine relatives. Retired Lt-Gen Suraj Shamsher Rana said the massacre on Friday night occurred during a gathering of about two dozen royal family members and aristocratic friends at the Narayanhiti palace.
He said several survivors told him that Dipendra had been drinking and "misbehaved" with a guest. King Birendra told him to leave. The witnesses told Rana that the drunken crown prince was taken upstairs to his room, escorted by two cousins. About half an hour later, Dipendra appeared on the stairs dressed in army fatigues and carrying an assault rifle.
He walked through a roomful of stunned guests to an adjacent room where the king and queen were sitting. He fired two shots into the ceiling, then turned his gun on his father, who fell to the floor. Dipendra continued firing. Screaming guests hid behind the sofas. He walked into the garden, where he was confronted by his younger brother, Prince Nirajan, and his mother.
Nirajan screamed at his brother: "Don't do it, please, kill me if you want." Dipendra shot him. When his mother tried to restrain him, he shot her as well. Prince Dhirendra Shah then stepped forward, facing the gun. He said: "You have done enough damage. Hand over the gun now." He too was shot and died on Monday.
Soon after, Dipendra shot himself, standing about 20ft from the bodies of his mother and brother. Until now, the royal family has maintained that the deaths were caused by the spontaneous explosion of a gun. But that account was criticised yesterday by a second member of the royal family.
Neer Shah, the brother of one of the murdered princesses, said: "The facts that I have been able to gather so far lead me to believe that Dipendra opened fire and killed everyone." In a belated attempt to stem the growing number of massacre accounts, the interior ministry yesterday cautioned editors in the capital Kathmandu against publishing anything "inflammatory" about the king's murder.
The curfew imposed for two days was relaxed today to a night-time ban. The state reinforced the message by arresting three journalists on treason charges after their newspaper published an article by the leader of Nepal's five-year-old Maoist insurgency accusing the palace of "covering up" the murders.
King Gyanendra set up an inquiry into the carnage after protesters demanded to know the truth. But that investigation has faltered after one of its three members refused to participate. It is unlikely that it will meet its Friday deadline to announce its findings. Nepal is now awash with competing accounts of the slaughter.
But all versions agree that Dipendra killed his family with an assault rifle, before turning the weapon on himself. He survived but was in a coma and died in hospital two days later. Some Nepali newspapers have suggested that Dipendra secretly married Devyani Rana, the 22-year-old daughter of a former foreign minister, some months ago.
They suggested that the killings occurred after he told his parents of the wedding. In this account, Queen Aishwarya angrily told her son that he would not be made king and ordered him upstairs. He returned shortly afterwards and opened fire. Yet another account suggested that Devyani was pregnant.
She has now left Kathmandu and is reported to be in Moscow with her elder sister, who is married to a London-based Indian businessman.
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Long life? It's all the toasts, says Duke(UK Times)
BY ALAN HAMILTON
THE Duke of Edinburgh, who celebrates his 80th birthday on Sunday, yesterday attributed his long and healthy life to the number of toasts that had been drunk to him.
At a lunch in Guildhall given by Sir David Howard, the Lord Mayor of London, and attended by 300 City worthies, dignitaries and their wives, the Duke responded to yet another raising of glasses in his honour.
“I can only assume that it is largely due to the accumulation of toasts to my health over the years that I am still enjoying a fairly satisfactory state of health and have reached such an unexpectedly great age,” the Duke said, to the laughter of aldermen and liverymen.
As befits an octogenarian, the Prince was in a mood to reminisce, recalling his first visit to Guildhall in 1948, soon after his marriage to Princess Elizabeth, when he was given the freedom of the City.
“I hope you will understand when I say that it was a daunting occasion for a relatively junior naval officer, but I still remember it with pleasure. So much has happened since then that it was difficult to appreciate quite what life was like just two years after the end of the war,” the Duke said.
“My generation had barely had time to experience life in peacetime before the war broke out. Our formative years were spent in more or less violent conflict, both in this country and various other parts of the world. I only got back to this country from the Far East in January 1946.”
The Duke allowed himself a moment of philosophising. “I suppose there are a few fortunate souls who have managed to get through life without any anxieties, but my experience is that life has its ups and downs — for most of us anyway. I just want to assure you that coming to this wonderful Guildhall has always been a pronounced ‘up’ in my life.”
The Lord Mayor praised Prince Philip for the support he had given the Queen in her reign, for being an environmentalist before the term had been invented, and for being a liveryman of ten worshipful City livery companies.
As a birthday gift the City gave Prince Philip a set of original botanical watercolours from a book he had once helped to get published. The Duke relished reeling off their names to his audience: soapwort, bladder campion, swine’s succory, nipplewort, common sow thistle and bastard toadflax.
A group of schoolchildren, sponsored by a supermarket, will present the Duke with a birthday cake outside Buckingham Palace tomorrow, but his real celebration will be on Sunday, when he attends morning service at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, followed by a reception which will be hosted by the Queen and attended by 450 friends, family and representatives of his many organisations.
Because of their health, the presence of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret remains in doubt. One guest certain to attend is the Prince of Wales, despite recent reports that the father does not regard the son as suitable material for kingship.
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Diana butler in court on theft charges(Yahoo: Ananova)
Royal butler Harold Brown is due to appear in court accused of stealing property from the estate of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Brown, 48, has been charged on four counts of theft from Diana's estate.
He is charged with stealing a jewel daffodil motif, a ring, a model dhow and base, a bangle, a pair of earrings and £1,200.
The charges concern belongings which went missing between 1 January 1997 and 15 November 2000.
The former butler to Diana is now an employee of Princess Margaret and works as a butler at Kensington Palace.
The model of an Arab dhow was a gift from the Emir of Bahrain when the Prince and Princess of Wales married in 1981.
Brown, who is on conditional bail, is due to appear at Bow Street Magistrates Court in central London.
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Nepal faces power vacuum after slaughter of royals(Yahoo: Reuters)
By David Fox
KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Nepal faces a power vacuum as the people come to terms with the unbelievable -- a beloved crown prince murdered the king and queen before pulling the trigger on himself.
The bloody massacre of the royal family has left the impoverished Himalayan country in crisis, with the new king yet to win over a traditionally loyal population and a government hardly less secure in its tenure.
The latest in a series of curfews imposed to quell the sort of rioting that erupted on Monday, three days after the palace slaughter, ended at 3 a.m. on Thursday, but authorities said it was purely precautionary.
There was no sign in the capital on Wednesday of the sort of protests that greeted new King Gyranendra's announcement in the aftermath of the killings that it had been an accident.
Rather, there was a sad acceptance of the truth -- or the truth that has been leaking out in more detail over the past few days -- that Crown Prince Dipendra was responsible for the carnage.
In the most complete version of the bloody events of last Friday, media accounts and royal insiders said the heir to the throne -- angered by his family's refusal to let him marry the woman of his choice -- killed his father King Birendra, his mother Queen Aishwarya and seven others with an automatic weapon.
A friend of the royal family told Reuters that Dipendra was clinically dead when he was brought to hospital after shooting himself through the chin. He was named king anyway, but died on Monday.
The massacre has left a power vacuum in the tiny kingdom where the late King Birendra was hugely popular, particularly after he ceded absolute power in favour of a constitutional monarchy in 1990.
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French photographer faces probe for Diana pictures(Yahoo: Reuters)
PARIS (Reuters) - A French photographer who took pictures on the scene of the crash that killed Princess Diana has been placed under formal judicial investigation for invasion of privacy, judicial sources have said.
Jacques Langevin, who works for the Corbis-Sygma agency, photographed the mangled wreckage of the Mercedes car in which Diana, her Egyptian friend Dodi al Fayed and driver Henri Paul were killed in Paris on August 31, 1997.
The photographs were impounded by police soon after the crash and have never been published.
Under French law, a judicial investigation does not necessarily lead to charges being pressed.
A French court cleared Langevin, along with nine other press photographers who pursued Diana's car as it left the Ritz Hotel just before the fatal crash, of charges of manslaughter brought by al Fayed's father, Mohamed, and by Paul's parents.
Judges Herve Stephan and Marie-Christine Devidal ruled that the driver, who had more than the legal amount of alcohol in his bloodstream at the time of the accident, was responsible for the crash, not the paparazzi.
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Queen joins Mothers' Union celebration(Yahoo:Ananova)
The Queen is marking the 125th anniversary of the Mothers' Union.
While the rest of the country is being urged to go to the polls, the Queen - who cannot vote - is to attend a Mothers' Union service at Westminster Abbey.
Both the Queen and the 100-year-old Queen Mother are patrons of the Christian organisation which supports and promotes family life.
The Mothers' Union, founded in 1876 by vicar's wife Mary Sumner at Old Alresford, near Winchester, now has one million members across 62 countries.
Worldwide president Trish Heywood said: "The theme 'Faith in the Family' is at the heart of the Mothers' Union's celebrations during our 125th anniversary year.
"We're looking at the issues affecting family life on a global basis and identifying how our members can respond at a grassroots level to improve conditions."