Kathmandu’s Dark Secrets: The Lives and Deaths of Mirza Dilshad Beg and Jamim Shah
Kathmandu, to most, is a city of temples, mountains, and tourists chasing the mystique of the Himalayas. But in the backstreets of Lazimpat and the quiet lanes of Siphal, another story unfolded in the 1990s and 2000s—a story of power, crime, and blood. Two men came to symbolize this hidden world: Mirza Dilshad Beg, a lawmaker with one foot in parliament and another in the underworld, and Jamim Shah, a media tycoon whose empire made him rich and powerful, but also marked.
Both rose quickly. Both carried whispers of links to Dawood Ibrahim and Pakistan’s ISI. And both met the same end: gunned down in the streets of Kathmandu.
The Politician Who Played with Fire
Mirza Dilshad Beg didn’t look like a gangster. He wore the confidence of a politician, the smile of a man who knew the right people. Born across the border in Uttar Pradesh, he crossed into Nepal and built a political career, eventually becoming a Member of Parliament and even a minister.
But behind the speeches and the smiles, the whispers grew louder. Intelligence files described him as Dawood Ibrahim’s key man in Nepal. His residence in Kathmandu was rumored to be a safe house for fugitives, a hub for counterfeit currency, and a passage for weapons.
On June 29, 1998, the double life caught up with him. As he stepped out of his car in Siphal, gunfire cracked the summer air. Neighbors ran out to see their lawmaker lying on the ground, riddled with bullets. The killers melted away into the city, but the message was clear: Beg had played a game too dangerous, and the house always wins.
The Cable King of Kathmandu
While Beg built influence through politics, Jamim Shah chose the glowing screen. In the 1990s, when Nepal was only beginning to open up, Shah launched Space Time Network and Channel Nepal. He wired the capital with thousands of kilometers of cable, bringing international channels into Nepali homes. For a while, he was the face of progress, a businessman who modernized entertainment.
But success is never without shadows. Indian media painted him as a pawn of Dawood and the ISI, accusing him of running anti-India propaganda. The allegations clung to him like smoke.
Then came December 2000. Channel Nepal aired a false report that Bollywood star Hrithik Roshan had insulted Nepal. Within hours, riots broke out. Streets burned, four people died, nearly two hundred were injured. The government shut down his channel. For Shah, the Cable King, the crown had cracked.
Still, he moved like a man untouchable—until February 7, 2010. That evening, as his car rolled past the French Embassy in Lazimpat, two men on a motorcycle pulled up. Shots rang out. Three bullets tore into him. By the time he reached the hospital, Jamim Shah was gone. The killers vanished into Kathmandu’s traffic, leaving behind a smoking trail of questions that no one dared answer.
Two Lives, One Pattern
Look closely at their stories, and the parallels are haunting.
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Both men operated in Kathmandu’s elite circles, yet were tied to the shadows.
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Both were accused of serving Dawood Ibrahim’s interests.
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Both enjoyed political protection while alive.
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Both were shot dead in public, in carefully planned attacks.
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And in both cases, the masterminds were never truly exposed.
It’s as if the same script was written twice, twelve years apart.
Kathmandu’s Ghosts
To this day, the killings of Beg and Shah hang over Nepal like unfinished business. Who ordered the hits? Was it rival gangsters, foreign intelligence, or simply enemies within? The truth has never surfaced. In a city famous for its secrets, perhaps it never will.
But the echoes remain. The shot that dropped Mirza Dilshad Beg in 1998, and the bullets that silenced Jamim Shah in 2010, were not just personal vendettas. They were warnings. In Kathmandu’s hidden world, where politics, media, and the mafia meet, no one is untouchable.
Walk through Lazimpat at dusk, and the air feels ordinary—cafés buzzing, embassies secure, taxis honking. But history lingers in the pavement. It remembers the gunfire, the blood, and the silence that followed.
Mirza Dilshad Beg and Jamim Shah lived in very different worlds. One wielded political power, the other controlled television screens. Yet both became pawns in a larger game of crime and geopolitics. Their lives remind us of an unsettling truth: in Kathmandu’s underworld, the line between influence and downfall is thinner than a trigger pull.
