Kathmandu, Aug 25 - Eight tumultuous years after the massacre of Nepal's king Birendra and his entire family in the tightly guarded royal palace, fresh theories are still surfacing in this country about who plotted the bloodbath.

Earlier this month, a mild-mannered bespectacled man called Tul Prasad Sherchan walked into Nepal's best known media club to announce that he had killed the king for defying his warning. The 65-year-old claimed he had warned Birendra and his family not to divert the foreign aid meant for the development of the country into family bank accounts abroad.

Now a former royalist minister has come up with a new theory for the royal assassination.

Durga Pokhrel, former women, children and social welfare minister, last week created a sensation by claiming in Nepali Jana Aastha weekly that Girija Prasad Koirala, former Nepali prime minister and architect of the peace pact with the Maoists, had plotted in the past to kidnap the then crown prince Dipendra.

'It was an absolutely planned assassination,' Durga Pokhrel told IANS. 'And the government was well aware of the conspiracy.'

Pokhrel, former head of the National Women's Commission and once member of Koirala's Nepali Congress party, is holding the veteran politician responsible for the carnage in which the king, queen Aishwarya and eight more royals were killed during a traditional family dinner.

'Koirala was both prime minister and defence minister at that time,' Pokhrel said. 'When the government knew even what a man on the street was doing, how could it not be aware of what was going on in the palace?'

Pokhrel fell out with her party in 2005 when she was appointed minister by King Gyanendra, Birendra's younger brother who ascended the throne after his murder.