Ex-minister’s son questioned over Nepal tycoon’s murder

KATHMANDU - Police and intelligence officials have begun interrogating the son of a former Nepali minister to nab the killers of media tycoon Jamim Shah who was gunned down in full public view here.

While a red-faced Nepal government announced the formation of three separate probe teams to arrest the assailants, who are believed to be part of an international gang, police and National Investigations Department officials Monday questioned Yunus Ansari in Kathmandu Central Jail twice.

Yunus Ansari, the son of former royalist minister Salim Miyan Ansari, was arrested last month in Kathmandu after police nabbed his bodyguard in the act of fetching fake Indian notes worth Rs.2 million from two Pakistani conduits from a hotel in the capital’s Thamel area.

Shah, who was shot dead Sunday in a heavily guarded locality of the capital, had always denied allegations of links with Dawood Ibrahim, the underworld don most wanted by the Indian government. He had also denied alleged links with Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). But Yunus Ansari’s repeated interrogation shows Nepal’s security agencies harbour the same suspicions.

Security sources told IANS that Ansari was also asked about other potential targets in Nepal.

His father Salim Miyan Ansari, a powerful politician who first became a minister from the ruling Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) and then abandoned the party to join the royal cabinet formed by King Gyanendra after a coup in 2005, was another potential target, sources said.

However, illness confined him to his house and staved off an attack.

Shah’s killing bears an uncanny resemblance to the murder of another controversial Nepali lawmaker, Mirza Dilshad Beg, in 1998.

Beg, said to be an aide of Dawood and involved in smuggling fake Indian currency to India, was killed while alighting from his car before his residence in the capital. The killing was later owned up by Indian underworld don Chhota Rajan, who was emerging as Dawood’s rival.

On Monday, a man calling himself Bharat Nepali, who was once Rajan’s trusted henchman but left him recently to form his own gang, called up a television station and two other organisations in Kathmandu, claiming responsibility for the attack on Shah.

Shah was gunned down in his own car in one of the most tightly guarded areas of the capital housing four embassies as he was going home from a five-star hotel sauna.

A Yamaha motorcycle edged close to his car in the traffic snarl and the pillion rider, his face hidden by a handkerchief, went over and fired point blank.

Flayed by the victim’s family and the media, Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal called an emergency meeting of the cabinet and announced the formation of a five-member committee headed by a former judge to investigate the killing.

Two other inquiry panels have also been formed by the police.

The murder of Shah, who headed Space Time Network, a private media group that pioneered cable television in Nepal and runs a television station, has also triggered condemnation from the media fraternity.

The Federation of Nepalese Journalists said it would take out a protest rally in the capital Tuesday to pressure the government into taking prompt action against the sharpshooters.

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders issued a statement, urging the Nepal government not to rule out the possibility that the murder was linked to his media activities.