Britain's Princess Anne starts tour of Nepal

November 24, 2000
Web posted at: 6:59 AM HKT (2259 GMT)

KATHMANDU, Nepal (Reuters) -- Britain's Princess Anne arrived in the Himalayan kingdom of Nepal on Thursday to begin a five-day official visit.

The princess, who arrived in Kathmandu after a three-day swing through Bangladesh, is due to meet Nepali King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya on Friday, the Foreign Ministry said.

She will also tour a leprosy hospital near Kathmandu, open a new British Council building in the Nepali capital and visit a British Gurkha camp.

Princess Anne, who has been president of the charity Save the Children Fund since 1970, is also scheduled to tour a disabled children's education project and meet former street children at a charity centre in west Nepal.

Officials said the princess would meet girls rescued from brothels and traffickers in young girls at a hospital for AIDS patients in east Nepal run by the Maiti Nepal charity.

The princess is also scheduled to meet some of the more than 98,000 refugees from Bhutan who are of ethnic Nepali origin, a Foreign Ministry official said.

The refugees, who fled the neighbouring Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan in the early 1990s demanding political freedom and human rights, are living in seven U.N.-supervised camps in east Nepal.

Several rounds of talks between Nepal and Bhutan to return the refugees have failed over differences regarding their identification.

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