On the evening of 1 June 2001, shooting took place at a family dinner within the royal palace. The bullets killed King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, as well as several members of the family, and fatally wounded the heir, Crown Prince Dipendra, who passed away after spending two days in a coma. Gyanendra, the deceased king's younger brother, was absent from the palace. Gyanendra along with his wife and son survived the incident, even though the latter two had attended the dinner. With his elder brother and two nephews now dead, Gyanendra ascended the throne. The crown prince, whose fatally-wounded body was found at the scene, was identified as the gunman.

The palace massacre represented a ‘dividing line’ between a before and an after in Nepalese history, and brought about a ‘shift in intelligibility’, opening up a wide scope of possibilities. It transformed print media into what could be described as ‘written rumour’, with the information ascribed to the crowds and the information contained in’ (or possibly fabricated by) the press forming a continuum. All print media, to different degrees, gave visibility to rumours, if sometimes to condemn them. Yet, I propose not to differentiate between them, believing that despite their position and qualitative difference, dissemination and visibility matter more than the positive or negative connotation. This is also justified by the event chosen for this study, which generated such an immense need for information that the boundaries between various categories of media were blurred.

The chief uncertainties were around the causes, scenario and actors’ roles, not about the event itself: the brutal murder of the royal family. There was therefore an objective foundation for the rumours, which distinguishes them from ‘urban legends’ or rumours whose point of departure is unknown and which may not even be ‘factual.’ There remains the question as to why the press turned ‘rumouristic’: is it because in dealing with public figures, it adopted the ‘scandal’ style common for covering such topics? Was the event so transgressive that there was no other way to refer to it?