| KATHMANDU: As relatives grieved and the body of the third victim of the Nepal church bombing was consigned to flames, police said they had arrested the Nepali woman who had planted the bomb that killed three people at prayer and injured more than a dozen.
“We arrested Sita Shrestha nee Thapa, a 27-year-old woman, who confessed she had taken the bomb to the Assumption Church in her handbag and hidden it in the prayer hall,” deputy inspector-general of police and spokesman of the force Vinod Singh told TNN.
Shrestha, a resident of Gyaneshwor in Kathmandu, was arrested from a different place — Baneshwor — at 3am Tuesday after investigation. Soon after the blast on May 23, the new government of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal had formed a three-member team to probe the attack.
Calling a press conference in the capital Tuesday to disclose the arrest, police said Shrestha would be kept in custody till investigations are complete. She would be produced in court in due course, police said.
While the arrested woman reportedly confessed she belonged to a group called the Hindu Rashtra Bachao Samiti that aims to have Hindusim back in Nepal as the state religion, it was not known immediately if she was a member of the shadowy underground group Nepal Defence Army (NDA), which claimed responsibility for the bombing. “She said she was motivated by the NDA,” Singh said.
Shrestha is alleged to have carried a pressure cooker converted into a bomb in a bulky handbag. She went to the prayer hall of the church, pushed her bag under a floor cushion and then went out, saying she was going to the toilet. She never came back.
Around 9am, the bomb went off, killing 15-year-old Celeste Joseph, whose father Balan Joseph is from Kerala, and 19-year-old Deepa Patrick, who had come from Patna with her husband Vikash four days ago for their honeymoon. On Monday, after fighting for life for a week, Celeste’s mother Buddha Laxmi Joseph died of haemorrhage, throwing the family into fresh paroxysms of grief. The 45-year-old mother of three was cremated in Teku Tuesday after her last rites in the same church where she died.
The NDA, headed by Ram Prasad Mainali, has in the past bombed two mosques in the Terai, killing two people during prayer, and a church in Biratnagar in eastern Nepal. They also took responsibility for a blast at a meeting of the major political parties last month and one more near the International Convention Centre last May where the newly elected constituent assembly held its historic first meeting to abolish monarchy in Nepal.
Doubts however would remain about the police claim. In the past, police claimed a wellknown journalist was involved with an armed group from the Terai and arrested him on the basis of “confessions” by two other journalists. However, there are reports that journalist Rishi Dhamala was framed for activities that embarrassed the earlier Maoist government. |
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