Nepal's anti-corruption agency has charged 34 serving and retired high-ranking police officials with embezzlement of millions of dollars while purchasing armoured vehicles for members of the country's police force who were deployed as UN peacekeepers in Sudan's volatile Darfur region.
The Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) accused the policemen of misappropriating about 300 million Nepali rupees ($4 million) by purchasing obsolete and sub-standard armorer vehicles for the Nepali peacekeepers in Darfur.
The CIAA said Wednesday that it has charged 24 police officials and 10 retired officers, including three former police chiefs, in connection with the case. All of them have also been ordered to appear before a special court within 15 days.
The serving officers have been automatically suspended when the case was filed. The commission has asked for sentences of up to 13 years under provisions of the country's anti-corruption act for those found guilty.
Nepal currently has some 150 police officers in Darfur as part of the 22,000-strong joint United Nations-African Union peace-keeping force (UNAMID) deployed there since January 2008. The scam came to light in 2009 when the UN reported that the vehicles sent by Nepal were unsafe and did not meet the required specifications.
Following the UN report, a Nepali parliamentary team visited Darfur in April 2010 to assess the situation. The team later confirmed that the vehicles were unsafe, prompting an investigation into the procurement process of the vehicles in question.
Earlier, there were speculations that the UN had plans of repatriating the Nepalese peacekeepers if the Himalayan country's government failed to provide armoured vehicles and other logistics which met the required specifications to its forces. However, the UN has since rejected such claims. The Nepali government has said it is now in the process of procuring new vehicles for its forces in Sudan.
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