Kathmandu, March 12 (IANS) Only 48 hours after Nepal's communist-led government declared International Women's Day a national public holiday, soldiers shot dead three Dalit women, including a 12-year-old girl, while the authorities tried to hush it up by alleging it to be a shoot-out.

The three victims were identified as Chandrakala Bishwokarma, 12, Devisara Bishwokarma, 35, and Amrita Bishwokarma, 32.

The killings took place Wednesday in the Bardiya National Wildlife Park in farwestern Nepal, a remote and underdeveloped Bardiya district that had witnessed some of the worst rights violations and disappearances by the army during the decade-old Maoist insurgency.

The three victims had entered the wildlife park to cut grass, a precarious means of livelihood for many Dalits.

The government tried to cover up the killings, claiming the deaths occurred while an army patrol encountered a group of poachers inside the national park.

In a statement, Nepal Police said the army patrol fired in retaliation as they were fired upon by poachers. The statement claimed that the patrol recovered three guns and ammunition from the spot.

Police also said a man, Krishna Bishwokarma, has been arrested. The two women who were killed were his wife and sister-in-law while the 12-year-old girl was his daughter.

The news of the killings came even as the US Department of State released its 2009 Country Reports on Human Rights that said impunity for human rights violators, threats against the media, arbitrary arrest, and lengthy pre-trial detention were serious problems in Nepal.

It said the fate of many of those who disappeared during the Maoist insurgency remained unknown.

The government turned a blind eye to a UN report on 49 disappeared persons who had been arrested and detained by the army at barracks in Kathmandu in 2003 on suspicion of being linked to the Maoists. It ignored a UN document on disappearances in Bardiya district where at least 170 people went missing between 2001 and 2004, the rights report said.

Maoist militias too engaged in arbitrary and unlawful use of lethal force and abduction while violence, extortion, and intimidation continued throughout the year.

Nepal's biggest NGO, Informal Sector Service Centre, has reported that security forces or other armed groups killed 229 people in 2009.

While security forces killed at least 37 individuals, the Maoist party and its affiliate the Young Communist League were believed to have killed four persons. Armed groups operating in the Terai plains in southern Nepal killed 21 people while 141 people reported killed could not be linked to a specific group, or the families and reporters were afraid to name the group.