Massacre at the Palace

by Read Listen Learn

Nepal is a beautiful country in the Himalaya Mountains, north of India. Most people are farmers living in the high mountains. It is a very old and poor country with strong traditions. One of those traditions was that Nepal was a kingdom, passing from father to son, king to crown prince. The King’s family lived in a large palace at Kathmandu, the capital city. Here, they had dinners and parties for important people and foreign visitors but sometimes they were alone with just their servants.

We don’t know what they talked about but we do know that marrying their children well and carefully was very important. On the night of 1st June, 2001, they were talking about the right wife for the prince, Dipendra, who would be king when his father died. Whoever he married would be the next queen of Nepal and the mother of a future king, too.

Nothing was very different that night but, in the middle of the evening, Prince Dipendra was rude to one of the others and his father told him to go to his room. The prince was almost certainly very drunk. A short time later he returned to the room where the others were still talking. The prince was dressed in military uniform and he had three guns with him; two of them were machine guns. He fired once up into the air and then started firing at people, killing or wounding many of them.

Some of the people there, most of them the killer’s family, tried to grab one of the guns and shoot back or talk him into stopping. He kept running into the room, shooting and then running back out again. After many long minutes of killing, the prince ran out of the palace and into the gardens. He went to a little bridge and there he shot himself. He died three days later after being in a coma. Strangely, he was king for three days while he was alive because his father, the old king, was dead and the rules said the prince must be next. The rules did not say what to do if the prince was the person who killed the king.

The shooting left nine people, mostly from the king’s family, dead. There were also several wounded, some of them very seriously. The first question asked was ‘why’? Did the prince really kill all those people because he was drunk and his father spoke to him like a little boy? Few people believe that. Some say it was because he wanted to marry one woman and his parents wanted him to marry another. But, again, this doesn’t seem like a good reason to kill many of his family and servants he knew well. This is the story from the Nepalese police but some people are doubtful.

As usual, there are many explanations offered by different people but some witnesses at the time or close to the police investigation say that the prince was dead before the rest of his family, not after, and that a couple of special soldiers came in and did the killing.

One thing we know is that it completely changed who would be the next king. After the prince died in his coma, his uncle became king and his cousin became the crown prince. Both his uncle and cousin were unpopular in Nepal and many people asked how, with both of them in the room at the time of the shooting, they were not touched. The list of royals killed is more or less exactly the people who stood between the uncle and the crown.

Luckily for him, they all died at one go, leaving him to become king of Nepal. This also made the uncle’s Indian and U.S. backers very happy because the new king of Nepal was a good friend of theirs. Nepal is now a republic.