KATHMANDU: Nepal’s royalist government faced violence on two fronts on Thursday as police rounded up hundreds of opposition supporters in rowdy anti-monarchy protests and suspected Maoist rebels set off a bomb in Kathmandu. Defying a week-old ban on public assembly in the capital, supporters of a five-party opposition alliance demanding a return to elected rule rallied near the palace chanting,

"Down with King Gyanendra! We want democracy!" Several hundred armed police quickly sealed off the area, taking away protesters in waiting trucks. The opposition said 1,354 people were taken into custody. Police confirmed detaining 652 people and said many were promptly released. Among the activists detained and then freed were Girija Prasad Koirala, who served as prime minister three times between 1998 and 2001 and heads the Himalayan kingdom’s largest party, the Nepali Congress. The king dismissed the elected government in 2002 and appointed a pro-royal cabinet, accusing political veterans such as Koirala of providing little more than political infighting during the kingdom’s 12 years of elected rule. The Nepal Communist Party-United Marxist and Leninist, the main opposition in the dissolved parliament, said in a statement that four of its activists were "badly beaten" by police during the latest protest.

Police had no immediate comment. "We are pressing to defy the prohibition of public assembly and will hold meetings at any cost," Krishna Gopal Shrestha, the main organiser of the protests, told AFP by mobile telephone as police took him away. The government on April 8 indefinitely banned protests, which it said were set to be infiltrated by the Maoists, who have been waging a bloody eight-year insurgency to overthrow the monarchy and control much of the countryside. Police said the Maoists on Thursday bombed a municipal office in the capital’s Baudhanath area, which is usually packed with tourists visiting a nearby Buddhist temple that dates to the seventh century AD.

"Two Maoists pointed guns at the guards of the municipal ward office while a third went in and placed a bomb. The Maoists then shouted out, ‘Bomb! Bomb! Everyone leave immediately,’" a police official said. Nobody was hurt as everyone in the office made it out, but the building was badly damaged, police said. But in Dhading district, 96 kilometres (60 miles) west of Kathmandu, suspected Maoists killed the father of a local official in a bombing at the family’s house, police said. Rebels warned the family of District Council chairman Mohan Krishna Shrestha that they had planted a bomb. His father Dev Krishna Shrestha, who was in his 70s, died as he jumped out of a first-floor window, police said.

Close to 2,500 people have been killed in the insurgency since August when peace talks between the Maoists and the royalist government broke down, according to a human rights group’s report last week. The opposition wants the government to reopen talks with the rebels. Riot police also rounded up more than a dozen human rights activists Thursday who demanded the release of 15 people still detained after last week’s protests. The 15 include seven members of the People’s Front, a left-wing party that broke with the Maoists in 1996 when the rebels took up arms against the state.