The assassination on Sunday morning of the chief of Nepal\'s paramilitary Armed Police Force marks a new strategy on the part of the Maoists, and a dangerous new escalation in the conflict.

Inspector General Mohan Krishna Shrestha was gunned down on the Ring Road in Patan while returning from the Bagalamukhi Temple. His wife, Nudup, who was a teacher at the international Lincoln School in Kathmandu, was also killed. The assailants shot at the couple and their bodyguard from a car parked on the side of the road, eyewitnesses said.

The Maoists have stepped up their attacks in the run-up to the seventh anniversary of the start of the "peoples\' war", and had warned through pamphlets that they would be intensifying their offensives. But this is the first time that they have carried out such a daring and high-profile assassination in the capital.

Some analysts see it as an effort to bring the conflict to the capital, where the government has been accused of showing little concern over the fighting in the countryside. But military sources said they had been expecting
attacks like this after several Maoist offensives on security forces bases and district headquarters had been foiled in recent months. "They need to do this to keep the morale of their militia up, and also to show that they can attack
anyone anywhere," one source told us. In the countryside, the Maoists are now concentrating on ambushing security forces patrols with improvised remote-controlled booby-trap mines instead of frontal attacks on bases. Six police and soldiers have been killed in the past week in such ambushes. IG Shrestha himself had just returned to Kathmandu last week from a tour of mid-western districts where he had inspected the Armed Police Force bases. He headed a paramilitary force that was set up two years ago to support the civilian police in counter-insurgency.