By Shambhu Bhujel

    KATHMANDU, June 23 (Xinhua) -- High schools in Nepal remained closed on Tuesday while students brought traffic to a standstill in the vicinity of a school in capital Kathmandu to protest against the brutal murder of a teenager and the growing targeting of school children by kidnappers.

    The anger was over the kidnapping and murder of Khyati Shrestha, a twelfth grader in Kathmandu's Jubilant College and Research Center.

    The teenager was kidnapped on June 5 and part of her body was found on Sunday after police arrested a 42-year-old former school teacher Biren Pradhan, and his 16-year-old accomplice.

    Pradhan reportedly forced the 16-year-old, who was a former student of his at Lalitpur's Adarsha Vidya Mandir in the south of Kathmandu, to call up the victim on her mobile phone and pretend she had been selected by a well-known women's magazine to receive acash award and a free trip to Pokhara city, some 180 km west of Kathmandu.

    When his accomplice delivered the unsuspecting girl to his apartment, Pradhan chloroformed her and then killed her. He then cut up her body into several pieces and scattered them in different areas so that the victim could not be easily identified.

    The former biology teacher then used the victim's mobile phone to demand a ransom of 1 million Nepali rupees (about 13,000 U.S. dollars) from her family.

    This is the second case of a student's abduction in less than a week in Kathmandu valley.

    On June 11, when a 10-year-old girl, Monica Piya Shrestha, was going to school in the capital, she was taken captive by two young men in daylight.

    They tied her hands and gagged her and sped away with her on a motorcycle when passersby chased them and caught them.

    The foiled kidnap attack caused parents' and educators' associations to call a school strike the following Sunday in protest.

    The protesters also handed over a memorandum to Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, asking for security in schools.

    The trend of kidnapping children and often killing them to prevent detection in the capital can be said to have started in 2006 when Bibek Luitel, an eight-year-old, was lured away from his home by people known to him with sweets.

    His beheaded body was later found in a dump.

    Besides kidnapping for ransom, there are also growing incidents of children being trafficked, either into slavery or prostitution in India and further abroad.

    Child right organizations in Nepal say children are chosen as they are easy targets. Also, with growing impunity in Nepal, many crimes go unpunished.