Nepal finally feels WikiLeaks heat

KATHMANDU - More than a week after whistleblower website WikiLeaks started to publish confidential US embassy cables, Nepal began to feel the heat Monday after a media report indicated that the Islamic terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) had penetrated the Himalayan republic.

Late reactions started coming Monday after a BBC report Saturday highlighted a cable sent by then US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, to Washington in 2009.

Though the report focused on the multiple terror attacks in India’s financial capital Mumbai in 2008, the cable, however, also affects India’s northern neighbour Nepal as Patterson says in it that “sleeper cells” of the LeT, held responsible for the Mumbai attacks, were still active in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal.

India’s intelligence agencies have been expressing growing concern that the LeT was establishing a stronghold in southern Nepal, which shares an open border with India, boosting the smuggling of fake Indian currency in both countries and providing logistical support to groups planning terror attacks on Indian targets.

Though Nepal’s government has been consistently denying the allegations, India lodged a formal complaint recently with Nepal’s foreign affairs and home ministries, saying Nepal’s opposition Maoist party had provided arms and explosives training to outlawed Indian Maoists with the help of an LeT operative in Nepal.

While the Maoists denied the charge, calling it a ploy to pave the way for Indian military intervention in Nepal, the fact remains that Nepal’s police have arrested and jailed an upcoming politician and media baron, who is also the son of a former minister, for involvement in running a fake Indian currency network through Nepal that is said to be linked to the ISI of Pakistan.

Though WikiLeaks said last week that it had 2,278 memos sent by the US embassy in Kathmandu to the US State Department in Washington, the Nepal documents are not among the ones posted so far.

The WikiLeaks memos on Nepal, sent between 1996 to February this year, mainly revolve around the Maoist insurgency, the political upheaval followed by King Gyanendras attempt to grab power with the help of an army-backed coup and the subsequent overthrow of his government due to a nationwide uprising.

While about 800 of the Nepal documents are unclassified, the rest are confidential with 84 labelled secret.