Kathmandu, March 20
Alarm and grief swept through Nepal Saturday after former prime minister Girija Prasad Koirala - architect of the peace negotiations that ended a decade of Maoist insurgency - died following fortnight-long respiratory problems. He was 85.
Armed police forces were deployed in the capital and around the residence of Koirala's daughter, Sujata Koirala, as politicians cutting across party lines, diplomats, civil society leaders and hundreds of grieving followers arrived there to pay their last respects to the man who spent more than six decades in the service of the nation.
Koirala's former prot