The riots killed at least 19 people in Nepal on Monday, authorities said, since the police in the capital fired tear gas and rubber bullets to protesters who try to assault Parliament with anger for a closure and corruption in social networks.
Some of the mainly young protesters made their way in the Parliament Complex in Katmandu when breaking a barricade, said a local official, burning an ambulance and launching objects to the lines of the riot police that protect the legislature.
“The police have been shooting indiscriminately,” said a protester to ANI news agency.
“[They] He shot bullets that missed me but hit a friend who was standing behind me. He was beaten in his hand. “
More than 100 people, including 28 police personnel, received medical treatment for their injuries, said police officer Shekhar Khanal Reuters. The protesters were transporting the injured to the hospital in motorcycles.
Two other people were killed when the protests in the eastern city of Itahari became violent, police said.
Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli convened an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the riots, which exploded after thousands of young people, including many with their school or university uniforms, took to the streets today.
Many carried flags and banners with slogans such as “closing corruption and not social networks”, “Zron social networks” and “young people against corruption”, while marching through Katmandu.
The organizers of the protests, which extended to other cities in the country of Himalaya, have called them “manifestations of generation Z”. They say that protests reflect the generalized frustration of young people with government action to address corruption and increase economic opportunities.
“This is the protest of the new generation in Nepal,” said another protester. ANI.
A government decision to block access to several social media platforms, including Facebook, last week has fed anger among young people. About 90 percent of Nepal’s 30 million people use the Internet.
The authorities said they imposed the ban because the platforms had not registered with the authorities in a repression in misuse, including false social media accounts used to spread hate discourse and false news, and commit fraud.
Bastons and rubber bullets
Police had orders to wear water cannons, canes and rubber bullets to control the crowd and the army was deployed in the Parliament area to reinforce the agents of the law, said Muktiram Rijal, spokesman for the Katmandu district office. Reuters.
He said the curfew, which will remain in force until 10 pm local time (1615 GMT), had spread to the Katmandú Singha Durbar area, which includes the prime minister’s office and other government buildings.
The violence decreased later at night, although the protesters remained in the area outside the Parliament.
Police said that similar protests were also held in Biratnagar and Bharatpur in the southern plains and in Pokhara in western Nepal.
Many people in Nepal think that corruption is rampant, and the OLI government has been criticized by opponents not to fulfill their promises to address graft or move forward to address long -standing economic problems.
Thousands of young Nepalese go abroad every year for work and education.
Rameshwore Khanal, a former Secretary of Finance, said that although employment creation is not up to expectations, popular anger seems to arise more than unhappiness with government appointments and its inability to eliminate corruption.
The closure of Nepal’s social networks occurs when governments around the world take measures to harden the supervision of social networks and great technology due to growing concern about problems such as wrong information, data privacy, online damage and national security.
Critics say that many of these measures are at risk of suffocating free expression, but regulators say that stricter controls are needed to protect users and preserve the social order.
