7 Maoist rebels shot dead in Nepal
KATMANDU, Nepal (CNN) -- Security forces in Nepal shot to death seven Maoist rebels Friday in the central district of Dhading, some 20 miles west of the capital, government sources said.
Two security personnel were wounded in the encounter, the sources said.
Peace talks between the rebels and the government collapsed in August and in the final months of 2003, Nepal's government launched a major military offensive against the rebels.
More than 1,547 Maoists have been killed since the cease-fire between the rebels and the government collapsed last August, according to the Royal Nepal Army, which puts its own toll for the period at 144.
Nepal has lately come under intense pressure from human rights groups to improve its human rights record.
The country's own National Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International and the International Crisis Group have documented hundreds of cases of disappearances, illegal detentions, extrajudicial executions and acts of impunity by the security forces.
But at the ongoing U.N. Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva, Nepali Foreign Minister Bhekh Bahadur Thapa has defended the government's human rights record.
While reforms in 1990 "established a multiparty democracy within the framework of a constitutional monarchy" according to the CIA World Factbook, a 1996 Maoist insurgency has "gained traction."
Maoist rebels have been fighting since then to turn the Himalayan kingdom into a communist republic.
In October, the U.S. State Department designated the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) a terrorist organization under a presidential executive order, freezing the group's assets in the United States and prohibiting financial support of the Maoists by U.S. citizens.
Nepal's King Gyanendra was installed in early June 2001 after his elder brother, King Birendra, was killed by Crown Prince Dipendra. Ten royal family members died in the carnage June 1, including Dipendra, who was briefly crowned king as he lay in a hospital comatose from self-inflicted wounds.
