UML leader arrested, released in Delhi

December 30, 2003
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Indian authorities Monday detained a senior CPN-UML leader, Ishwor Pokhrel from New Delhi airport and released him after midnight, a radio station said Tuesday. Indian embassy in Kathmandu confirmed the incident, the radio said.

According to Kantipur FM, Indian immigration authorities stopped Pokhrel from boarding a flight to Kathmandu Monday, saying, they wanted to ask him something.

“They told me not to board the plane and stay with them,” the radio quoted Pokhrel as saying at the Kathmandu airport Tuesday.

“They asked me about Maoists’ activities in India and the recent meeting of our general secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal with the Maoist leaders in Lucknow,” Pokhrel, who is a standing committee member of the UML, said.

“I was in Delhi to take part in a program of Non-Resident Nepalis’ Association in India and to participate in their protest program,” he said. “I told the same thing to them, but they tried to cross the limit as they started to ask questions related to Nepali politics, such as why UML is not for a constituent assembly etc,” he said.

Pokhrel further blamed the Indian ambassador of playing a “dirty politics” here in Nepal. “Everybody knows that the ambassador is crossing the limits of a diplomat by showing unnecessary interests in Nepal’s internal politics,” he told the radio station. “This (the arrest) is a practice to make two countries’ relations bitter.”

Meanwhile, Sanjay Verma, first press secretary at the Kathmandu-based Indian Embassy confirmed the arrest and release of Pokhrel, according to the radio. “The interrogation was held on suspicions that Pokhrel met Maoist leaders in India,” the radio quoted Verma, as saying. “But I have don’t have complete information about the incident,” Verma said. 

Pokhrel is now in Kathmandu.