IANS

Kathmandu, Jun 30: Just four months after it was targeted by trade unions, the Manipal College of Medical Sciences in Nepal, one of the major Indian collaborations in the Himalayan republic, came under attack again Monday with a group of outsiders vandalising the office and manhandling doctors and nurses.

The 15-year-old institution, which is among the foremost medical institutions in western Nepal, shut down its operations in protest with the staff demanding security.

Prashant Chakrabarty, director at the teaching hospital run by the college, said that operations had resumed after police arrested five miscreants, including two women, and they had apologised.

Trouble erupted around Sunday midnight when a 17-year-old girl, Anubha Subba, went missing from the intensive care unit.

Subba had been brought to the hospital five days ago after she had taken poison following a tiff with her boyfriend.

Though she recovered, her relatives and friends attacked the hospital around midnight, claiming that she had died and the hospital was trying to hide her body.

They damaged hospital records and equipment and shoved around the protesting nurses and doctors.

The police were called in and around 9 a.m., the missing girl was found in the general ward of the hospital.

In the past too, the hospital, a collaboration between India's Manipal Group and the government of Nepal, has come under attack by patients' relatives.

There has been growing anarchy in Nepal since the fall of King Gyanendra's army-backed regime three years ago.

Hospitals have been a regular victim of the prevailing chaos with patients' relatives attacking doctors with allegations of negligence.

Doctors backed by the Nepal Medical Council have repeatedly sought the intervention of the government but with little result.

In February, Manipal was also singled out by two powerful trade unions affiliated to the Maoists and the Nepali Congress, which is in the current ruling alliance, forcing the management to hike the wages of non-medical staff after shutting down the hospital for four days.