Kathmandu: The Rautahat District Court has sentenced Nepali Congress leader Mohammad Aftab Alam and three others to life imprisonment in the Rautahat mass massacre case.
A single bench of District Judge Matrika Prasad Acharya found Alam and three others guilty of an explosion in Faradawa village in the then Rajpur Municipality on April 9, 2008, ahead of the 2008 Constituent Assembly election, and the subsequent murder of 23 people. Alam and his associates were charged with the murder of 23 people, including those injured in the explosion. He has been accused of burning all the injured in his brick kiln.
The district court has also handed life sentences to Alam’s brother, Mohammad Mahtab Alam, as well as Shekh Saraz and Badri Sahani. Alam was arrested on October 13, 2019. The Rautahat District Government Attorney’s Office filed a case against 11 people on the charge of killing 23 people on November 4, 2019. He was sent to judicial retention on November 15, 2019. He is currently in Nakkhu jail.
Alam is charged of taking those injured in the blast and the bodies of those killed to a nearby brick kiln and throwing them into the furnace to destroy any evidence of the incident.
All those killed were making bombs to create terror during the first Constituent Assembly elections of 2008, in which Alam was a candidate.
Alam was elected from Rautahat Constituency-2 in the first Constituent Assembly elections in 2008. He lost in the second Constituent Assembly elections in 2013 but won in the parliamentary elections of 2017 from the same constituency.
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