There are no serving British Gurkhas in Iraq but an estimated 5,000 retired soldiers are working as security guards. The government announced a national day of mourning today and pledged 1m rupees in compensation to the families of each hostage. It said it will evacuate Nepalese workers still in Iraq.The Prime Minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, said: "I urge everyone to have patience, show tolerance and unity at this hour of grief." Barely a week ago, Maoist rebels lifted a six-day road blockade of Kathmandu.. The government has been heavily criticised for not sending a delegation to Iraq to negotiate the hostages' release, relying instead on the Nepalese ambassadors to Qatar and Pakistan to make appeals to the captors through Iraqi clerics.More than 700,000 Nepalese are believed to work outside Nepal, 2,000 of them in Iraq. But no police or army were present when demonstrators sacked the offices of Kantipur Publications, a leading media organisation.Tourists in Kathmandu were told to remain in their hotels. The army came two hours later to help us."Police fired in the air and used tear gas to disperse mobs outside the Jammi Mosque, about 200 metres away Crowds had begun storming the mosque at dawn. Files of documents, passports and passport photographs littered the street.Inside the Kashmiri mosque, in the centre of town, the courtyard was strewn with prayer mats, torn books and broken plant pots after 300 men stormed the building.

Crowds of young men, mostly students, chanting, "We don't need this government!" blocked traffic with piles of burning computers, filing cabinets and furniture looted from the agencies. "The more sensitive students were saying, 'Don't touch him', and the others said 'Kill him'," he said "In the end they left him alone He can't go outside the mosque without being beaten. The window had been smashed.The mosque's caretaker, a Hindu, stood in the imam's destroyed office and told how the mob had broken down the door of a room where the imam had been sheltering and pulled him out. Two fresh graves had been sabotaged, the prayer hall had been set on fire and the crescent on the mosque's dome had been bent. The imam sat quietly in a bare room, locked in from the outside.

"What the government should do is rescue all Nepalese people in Iraq."An indefinite curfew was imposed yesterday in Kathmandu after angry mobs stormed the city's two mosques, vandalised manpower agencies and attacked the offices of Qatar Airways and Gulf Air. Four deaths are unconfirmed but at least three people are known to have died in the violence which erupted after news of the slaughter of 12 Nepalese hostages in Iraq by an Islamic militant group, Ansar al-Sunnah, the largest number of foreign hostages to be killed at one time by insurgents in Iraq.The dead men, cooks and cleaners for the coalition forces, had gone to the Middle East lured by promises of work from some of Nepal's 500-odd manpower recruitment agencies. Every year, the agencies send thousands of Nepalese labourers to the Middle East.In Nepalgunj, Nepal's western capital, nine houses inhabited by Muslims were burnt down. The agencies' premises and shops run by Muslims have been main targets of the demonstrators. "The monkeys are known to wreak havoc in the villagers' fields and damage crops."Indian environmentalists are now calling on the government to do more to prevent wild monkeys and people coming into such direct conflict..

In front of Sun International Overseas, a company in the north of Kathmandu that sends workers to the Middle East, a 21-year-old student hurled an aquarium full of fish from the balcony of the company building, followed by a fax machine. Several traffic accidents had occurred after drivers were forced to swerve to avoid monkeys running into the road. The monkeys had taken to stealing clothes as well."We suspect that extreme anger and frustration must be behind this killing," the deputy commissioner of police in the nearby town of Rohtak said. The animals are beginning to compete with India's vast masses of poor for the same food, taking fruit from the trees and crops from the fields, and breaking into homes and stealing the little food that people have.In Chang, north-west of Delhi, the villagers had had enough. The smaller monkeys are terrified of the tame langurs and move on.But that option is beyond the budget of the poorer parts of society, and, to those people, the monkeys are becoming a more serious problem.