Nepal asked Moscow this week not to recruit its citizens into the Russian army, and to send any Nepali soldier in its armed forces back to the Himalayan nation after six of its citizens serving in Russia’s military were killed.

Kathmandu District Police chief Bhupendra Khatri said 10 people were in police custody after being detained over the past few days following tip-offs.

“We are discussing with the government lawyers about the case and will produce them to the court,” Khatri told Reuters. He did not say when they would appear in court.

Khatri said the detainees illegally charged each person up to $9,000 and sent them to Russia on “visit (tourist) visas”, mainly through the UAE. They were then recruited into the Russian army.

“It is a case of human smuggling … organised crime,” Khatri added.

The detainees could not be immediately reached for comment.

Nepal, which lies between China and India, has asked Russia, which invaded neighbouring Ukraine in February 2022 and has been engaged in a war since, to compensate the families of the Nepali citizens killed.

Nepali soldiers, called Gurkhas, are known for their bravery and fighting skills and have been serving the British and Indian armies after the independence of India in 1947 under an agreement among the three countries. There is no such agreement with Russia.

Millions of Nepalis are employed in civilian work – mainly as labourers in industries and construction sites – in South Korea, Malaysia and the Middle East.

The “Citizens’ Campaign” protesters say governments in place since the monarchy was scrapped, as part of a deal ending a Maoist insurgency, have failed to live up to commitments to develop one of the world’s poorest countries.

Protesters tried to dismantle a police barricade on the outskirts of Kathmandu and march into the centre of the capital, prompting riot police to intervene and repel the crowd, witnesses said.

“Police only tried to contain a huge anarchic crowd of protesters,” said Jitendra Basnet, the top official in the city administration of Kathmandu, in whose downtown area public protests are banned.

Some police officers were injured by stones thrown by protesters, said Basnet.

Durga Prasai, coordinator of the Citizens’ Campaign, said about 10 protesters were injured in the melee, two of them critically.

“We want the republican system abolished and the monarchy to be restored,” he said, vowing to continue agitating for that objective and calling for a general strike in Kathmandu, home to about four million people, on Friday.

A specially elected assembly abolished the 239-year-old monarchy in 2008 under terms of an accord that ended a Maoist insurgency, which killed 17,000 people between 1996 and 2006, and established a federal republic.

But political instability has afflicted Nepal since the end of the monarchy with over 10 changes of government, hobbling economic development and forcing millions of young people to seek work mainly in Malaysia, South Korea and the Middle East.

Former Maoist rebel chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who still goes by his nom de guerre of Prachanda (“Fierce”), is now Nepal’s prime minister heading a coalition with the centrist Nepali Congress party.

Gyanendra, the last king of the Himalayan mountain country wedged between India and China, lives as a commoner with his family in Kathmandu.

The quake occurred at 11:47 p.m. (1802 GMT) on Friday with a magnitude 6.4, Nepal’s National Seismological Centre said. The German Research Centre for Geosciences measured the quake at 5.7, downgrading it from 6.2, while the U.S. Geological Survey pegged it at 5.6.

The quake is the deadliest since 2015 when about 9,000 people were killed in two earthquakes in the Himalayan country. Whole towns, centuries-old temples and other historic sites were reduced to rubble then, with more than a million houses destroyed, at a cost to the economy of $6 billion.

Officials feared the death toll in Friday’s quake could rise as they had not been able to establish contact in the hilly area near the epicentre, some 500 km (300 miles) west of the capital Kathmandu, where tremors were also felt. The district has a population of 190,000 with villages scattered in remote hills.

“The number of injured could be in the hundreds and the deaths could go up as well,” Jajarkot district official Harish Chandra Sharma told Reuters by phone.

Police spokesman Kuber Kadayat said 92 people were killed in Jajarkot and 36 in neighbouring Rukum West district, both in Karnali province. The epicentre was in the village of Ramidanda.

At least 85 people were injured in Rukum West and 55 in Jajarkot, an official in the prime minister’s office said, while Sharma said at least 50 people were in hospitals in Jajarkot alone.

“Many houses have collapsed, many others have developed cracks. Thousands of residents spent the entire night in cold, open grounds because they were too scared to go in into the cracked houses as aftershocks struck,” Sharma said. “I have myself not been able to go in.”

Search and rescue must clear roads blocked by landslides, triggered by the earthquake, to reach the affected areas, police officer Namaraj Bhattarai said.

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal flew to the area early on Saturday with a 16-member army medical team to oversee search, rescue and relief, his office said.

Dahal, posting on the X social media platform, expressed deep sorrow at the loss of life and property in the quake and ordered security agencies to launch immediate rescue and relief operations.

Local media footage showed crumbled facades of multi-storied brick houses, with large pieces of furniture scattered. Videos on X showed people running into the street as some buildings were evacuated.

“Houses have collapsed. People rushed out of their homes. I am out in the crowd of terrified residents. We are trying to find details of damage,” police official Santosh Rokka said by phone.

The epicentre of the quake was at Dhading, about 55 km (35 miles) west of Kathmandu, it said.

“We felt very strong tremors. Some residents rushed out of their homes. There is no report of any injuries so far”, Badrinath Gaire, the most senior bureaucrat of Dhading district, told Reuters.

The quake was at a depth of 13 km (8.1 miles), the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre said.

The landslide after the quakes of magnitude 6.3 and 5.3 in the district of Bajhang, bordering India, blocked the road to the southern plains, interior ministry official Rama Acharya told Reuters.

The quakes, centred in Talkot and Chainpur, struck at an interval of about 30 minutes.

They were felt were as far away as the Indian capital of New Delhi, where people rushed out of houses and office blocks. There were no immediate reports of damage.

Police official Bharat Bahadur Shah said 11 people – seven women and four men – were injured and were being treated in hospital. One woman was missing after being hit by another landslip triggered by the quake, he said.

One of the injured people was hit by a falling object, said Narayan Pandey, the top district official. Some homes in Chainpur, a town in the district, collapsed.

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(This story has been corrected to fix the name of the top district official to Narayan Pandey from Baburam Aryalin, in paragraph 6)

The first lot of imports are likely to reach by Friday in Varanasi, Lucknow and Kanpur cities in northern India, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman told the parliament.

Tomato prices have surged more than 1,400% at the wholesale market to a record 140 rupees ($1.69) per kg in the past three months, with farmers citing reasons including poor rainfall, higher temperatures and a virus outbreak that have hit the crop.

Five Mexican tourists and the Nepali pilot of a small helicopter operated by the private Manang Air company were killed on Tuesday when their chopper crashed while returning from viewing Himalayan peaks, including Mount Everest.

“Non-essential flights like mountain flights, external load operations (sling flights) and showering of flowers by helicopters (will) be restricted till September,” the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) said in a Twitter post late on Wednesday.

Nepal, which is in the midst of the annual June-September monsoon season, has formed an investigation committee to find out what caused Tuesday’s crash.

The Himalayan nation, home to eight of the world’s 14 tallest mountain peaks including Mount Everest, has a history of air crashes, as many airlines fly to small airports in remote hills and near peaks often shrouded in clouds.

Nepal’s worst air crash in 30 years killed 71 people in January, when a plane went down near the tourist city of Pokhara.

The farmers were joined by other villagers, visitors from the cities and tourists visiting the Himalayan nation.

Rice is a staple food for millions of Nepalese and the crop is generally planted once a year in July and harvested about four months later.

Farmers and their families sang traditional songs to welcome the rain that is needed for the rice to grow and thanked the gods for sending the precipitation on time.

After planting lines of rice, they splashed in the muddy fields, smeared each other with mud and sand, and danced more before culminating the celebration with a feast.

The day is also known as “dahi chiura” for the yogurt and beaten rice that comprises one of the main dishes eaten during the feast.

Elsewhere in the country, people ate yogurt and puffed rice with mangos and bananas to mark the day at home.

The government has declared National Paddy Day a holiday and tried to encourage people to continue or return to farming rice, as many increasingly look to take up other professions.

Heavy rains washed away a hydroelectric project under construction on the Hewa River in Sankhuwasabha district in eastern Nepal where 16 workers have gone missing, said Bimal Paudel, a government official.

“One body has been recovered while police are searching for the missing labourers,” he said.

Nine people were also missing in flash floods and landslides in neighbouring Taplejung and Panchthar districts, bordering India in the east, officials said.

Gaurav Dhakal of the Panchthar district said overnight rains damaged two bridges on the Mechi highway, cutting off the road link to remote Taplejung district where four people were missing.

Officials said heavy rains prevented rescue workers from reaching the hilly Sidingwa village where at least 20 houses were at risk of being washed away.

Annual rains, which are crucial for crops, normally begin in mid-June and continue through September in Nepal.

Hundreds are killed or go missing in rains which spark floods inundating villages, crops and damaging infrastructure every year in mostly mountainous Nepal, nestled between China and India.

At least 12 climbers died and five are missing and feared dead on the 8,849 metre (29,032 foot) Mount Everest during this year’s main climbing season that has just ended, the deadliest since an earthquake triggered an avalanche that killed 18 people in 2015.

“Weakest clients with less experienced operators is part of the problem,” Guy Cotter, 69, a noted guide from the New Zealand who has climbed Everest five times, said in the Nepali capital, Kathmandu.

“Clients should have minimum climbing standards with proven prior ascents before coming to Everest,” he said.

Three sherpa climbers were killed when ice came crashing down on them on the lower reaches of the mountain in April and the rest of those who died succumbed to illness or exhaustion, government and hiking officials said.

Nepal does regulate the climbing of Everest and its other Himalayan peak, insisting that everyone gets a permit, for example, but Cotter said the operators who guide clients up the mountain should meet minimum standards of equipment and staff.

“There are many operators who take clients to Everest but do not understand how to avoid incidents occurring and when things do go wrong they do not have processes in place to address the problems,” Cotter said.

Bigyan Koirala, an official with the Department of Tourism that oversees climbing, said the government was considering more regulations but did not give details.

Nepal issued a record of 478 permits for Everest this year and hundreds of people made it to the summit.