Gurung with his parents outside the international airport in Kathmandu yesterday (Picture courtesy: Facebook ‘Free Dorje Gurung’).
BY MOBIN PANDIT and AZMAT HAROON
DOHA: A Nepalese chemistry teacher in a prestigious school here who was picked up by police early this month on complaints that he had insulted Islam, left for home yesterday after Qatar’s Public Prosecution decided not to press charges.
He was instead repatriated home. Dorje Gurung, 47, took a flight to Kathmandu late yesterday afternoon, police sources told The Peninsula.
A Nepalese embassy official familiar with the case confirmed Gurung had left for Kathmandu on Qatar Airways’ flight QR354 that left Doha International Airport at 3.10pm.
Gurung’s friends who had been running a campaign on the social media to get him released posted a photograph on the Facebook page ‘Free Dorje Gurung’ late last evening, showing him hugging his mother outside the Kathmandu airport.
Al Rayyan police said Gurung was taken into remand for questioning after he was picked up on May 1. Police, according to the law, can keep a suspect in the lock-up only for 24 hours.
“However, the Public Prosecution is authorised by the law to keep a suspect in remand for up to 12 days,” a senior Al Rayyan police official told this newspaper.
Gurung spent 10 days in remand and was not sent to jail since there was no need for his judicial custody.
“The Prosecution then decided not to file charges against him and instead deport him,” an official, from the investigative wing of Al Rayyan police, said.
After reaching Kathmandu, Gurung posted a detailed message on the campaign’s Facebook page: “I am home sound and safe. I couldn’t make any public announcements for security reasons until now.
“I still can find no words to thank you enough, words that sufficiently express my own and my family’s gratitude, for the gift the thousands of you have given me,” he said.
“The gift of freedom (Ask any of my friends and colleagues at Qatar Academy who received me upon my release yesterday afternoon),” Gurung said, avoiding any mention of the controversy that led to his arrest.
Earlier, media reports suggested that Gurung, who taught at Qatar Academy, had an argument with 12-year-old students after he was agitated as they were making fun of him and asked how they would like to be called terrorists.
One of Gurung’s friends and social media campaigners for his release, Rupesh Pradhan, told this newspaper on the phone yesterday that while he was picked up by the police for what was considered an insulting remark, no action was taken against the students who had teased and made fun of him.
A senior Qatari criminal lawyer, who didn’t want his name in print due to the sensitivity of the issue, said Gurung allegedly made the remark comparing Muslims to terrorists in reaction to a situation and he didn’t mean to insult Islam.
“According to Qatar’s laws, the remark cannot be considered as an attack on Islam,” said the lawyer. “It can only be treated as insulting an individual or a group of individuals and this wouldn’t attract articles of the blasphemy law.”
It should also be borne in mind that the teacher was addressing a group of students and that group might have had non-Muslims in it, or the entire group could have consisted of non-Muslims, the lawyer said. Qatar has a large population of non-Muslims.
“He was merely reacting to a group in a situation in which the students were talking to him impolitely,” said the lawyer. “I don’t think charges could have been filed against the teacher.”
One of the pro-Gurung campaigners, meanwhile, said that he was taken to the Public Prosecution every day while in police remand. He was, though, allowed to meet his friends and colleagues once or twice.
According to the Nepalese embassy, Gurung was here for two years and his job contract with Qatar Academy had already ended. “He was to travel home on April 28 for good,” said the embassy official. The mission even wrote a letter to Qatar’s Foreign Ministry to intervene in his matter and release him. “However, before we could get a reply he was released and allowed to travel home.”
The embassy official said that Gurung was unmarried and had a teaching career that spanned 24 years.
He had had teaching stints in Australia and Azerbaijan before he landed here to take up a job with Qatar Academy. A highly meritorious student, Gurung got scholarships and graduated from Italy and did his master’s from the US, said the embassy official.
