Hospital administrator Chandra Kumar Rai, citing doctors, said the Tibetan exile in his twenties and identified as Thundup Dopchen succumbed to his burn injuries at around 10:15 pm, just hours after his self-immolation bid. [break]He had suffered burns over 95 percent of the body.
DIG Keshav Adhikari, spokesperson of the Nepal police, confirmed that as of Thursday evening no relative or friend of the dead man or any organization had come to the police to claim the body.
The body has been kept at the hospital for further legal processes and they were waiting for family members or someone close to come forward to take the body, he added.
SP Pradhumna Karki of Metropolitan Police Crime Division, which is investigating the case jointly with the Metropolitan Police Range Office (MPRO) said, “We made enquiries with different persons from the Tibetan refugee camp and other stakeholders but we have not established any real identification of the dead man.”
MPRO, Hanumandhoka has been handling the case so far. According to DSP Chakra Bahadur Singh, spokesperson at MPRO, the office will issue a legal notice concerning the case and if no one approaches to claim the body till then it will be provided to some medical college or turned over to the Metropolitan City.
However, police officials said the chances of anyone coming forward to claim the body were very low.
The Tibetan had set himself on fire at 8:30 am Wednesday and then tried to run around the Bouddha Stupa with his arms wide open.
But police were able to extinguish the fire and he was taken to a nearby hospital from where he was transferred to TUTH.
The incident described by police as the first case of "self-immolation" by a Tibetan in Nepal, came just ahead of the Tibetan community´s planned protest rallies in Kathmandu.
The Tibetan government in exile, based in the Indian town of Dharamshala in the foothills of the Himalayas, had previously put the number of self-immolations since 2009 at 99, of which 16 were eventually unsuccessful.
Tibetans have chosen self-immolation to draw world attention to their cause. Bearing this in mind, police on high alert have been deployed for additional security at different protest-prone localities.
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