End of the Line

Relying on access to exclusive information, AP correspondent Neelesh Misra pieces together the jigsaw of sometimes conflicting accounts of the murders of the Neplaese royal family on June 1, 2001. A wider national tragedy stands revealed: a nation with one foot in the 16th century and the other, uncomfortably, in the 21st; and of a king whose grand plans for making that transition a smooth one would, in more ways than one, be brutally thwarted.