Car gifted by Hitler to Nepal king awaits new home

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - A car gifted by Adolf Hitler to aNepali king is likely to be displayed in a palace museum afterthe Himalayan nation abolished the 239-year-old monarchy andthe ousted King Gyanendra quit the palace.

Officials said a 1939 Mercedes Benz presented by the Nazileader to King Tribhuvan, Gyanendra's grandfather, is nowrusting at Nepal's main Narayanhiti palace grounds.

It is lying there for more than three years after anengineering college in Kathmandu, which was using it to trainmechanics, said it did not have enough money and spare parts torestore the antique car.

But now efforts are being made to display the car in thepalace, which the government says will be turned into a museum.

"We should display it in the new museum," said GovindaPrasad Kusum, a senior bureaucrat preparing an inventory of theproperty and other valuables of Gyanendra, which will be inpossession of the government. "The car will be a majorattraction there."

A special assembly elected in April overwhelmingly voted toabolish the monarchy last month and gave Gyanendra 15 days tovacate the pink pagoda-roofed palace, which he did last week.

The car was manually carried by scores of labourers forseveral days from Nepal's southern plains to Kathmandu in 1940,when the mountainous country had no roads.

Tribhuvan used the car when the Kathmandu valley had noother motor transport.

But after his death in the 1950s, the car gathered dust inthe premises of the Thapathali Engineering Campus which used itas a model to train the mechanics there.

Its hood and doors are coming off, the inside of the bonnetis rusting and seats are torn, an official said.

Nepal, wedged in the central Himalayas between China andIndia, opened up to modern development in the 1950s.

It has a more than 500,000 vehicles including motorcycles,running in a road network of about 17,000 kilometres (10,625miles) now.

(Editing by Bappa Majumdar and Sanjeev Miglani)