A man has been arrested on charge of writing on Facebook about the alleged abduction of Socialist Party lawmaker Dr Surendra Yadav by former Nepal Police IGP Sarbendra Khanal, and CPN lawmakers Mahesh Basnet and Kisan Shrestha eight months ago.
Khanal, Basnet and Shrestha had brought Yadav from Mahottari to Kathmandu on April 22 in what was accused by the party as abduction. Yadav was brought to Kathmandu and kept at Kathmandu Marriott Hotel with an intention to split Socialist Party with seven lawmakers.
But Yadav absconded a few hours later to foil the plan seemingly engineered by Prime Minister (PM) KP Sharma Oli who had brought an ordinance just a couple of days earlier making it easier to split political parties.
The rebel faction could not muster the necessary 40 percent in parliamentary party after Yadav absconded and the party accused the CPN lawmakers and ex-IGP of abducting him. The police first refused to register police complaint against the abduction and accepted it only after intense pressure from the party and the public.
The police never arrested the three even after the abduction complaint and the District Government Attorney Office, Kathmandu decided to not press abduction charges against the trio. But a former assistant sub-inspector of Nepal Police has been arrested eight months later on complaint of CPN lawmaker Basnet for writing about the issue on the social media then.
Dilli Bahadur Chand of Nepalgunj-18, Banke, who currently provides security to a private bank after retiring from Nepal Police around five years back, has been arrested from Nepalgunj Wednesday night.
Chand was never searched by the police in the intervening eight months and what exactly he had written on the social media has also yet to be clear, according to his family. He was suddenly arrested a day after lawmaker Basnet, who is in the Oli faction following the virtual split in ruling CPN, had reached Nepalgunj.
"It's mere coincidence that Chand has been arrested when Basnet arrived. We had received a letter from the Cyber Bureau to arrest and send him," Chief of Banke Police SP Om Rana claimed. "We have arrested and sent him to Kathmandu that day itself."
Chief of the bureau SSP Navind Aryal stated that Basnet himself had registered the cyber crime complaint and identifying the individual and Facebook account took time when asked why Chand was arrested eight months later.
Chand's family claim that he had only commented on another person's status and later apologized for the comment and deleted it. "I didn't know what he had written on Facebook. Is it right for a leader to seek vengeance against a commoner?" Chand's wife Kamala asked. "The government is criticized everywhere. Lodging a case to bother a commoner simply for abusive language against an elected official cannot be condoned."
