Kathmandu, Aug 7 - Nepal Police Thursday night arrested a man who had claimed to have plotted the assassination of Nepal's King Birendra and nine more members of the royal family in the tightly guarded pagoda palace in Kathmandu eight years ago.

Tul Prasad Sherchan, 59, was going to a meeting in an undisclosed place when the motorcycle he was riding pillion was stopped by police in the capital and he was marched off.

His companion and media advisor told IANS that he has been kept in the Hanumandhoka police station.

The arrest came after Sherchan walked into the best-known media club in the capital Wednesday and claimed to have had plotted the massacre in June 2001 that is regarded as the point when monarchy started crumbling in the world's only Hindu kingdom.

Dressed in traditional Nepali clothes and a traditional cap, the bespectacled man told the stunned gathering Wednesday that he was Tul Prasad Sherchan, chief of the intelligence bureau during King Birendra's reign.

Sherchan said he had planned the massacre in 1975 in London, and had tapes to bear out his claim.