University student Aditya Rawal was outside Nepal’s parliament with hundreds of other anti-corruption protesters when gunfire crackled and 14 people slumped down in front of him.

One was his university friend, and as he dashed forward to help — with his hands up — bullets smashed into him too.

“I heard somewhere that if you raise both hands, they will not shoot you,” Rawal, a 22-year-old digital marketer, told AFP as he lay on a bed in the capital Kathmandu’s Civil Service Hospital.

“But I was their target.”

At least 72 people were killed during chaos beginning on September 8, as youth protests under a loose “Gen Z” label rallied against a government ban on social media.

“There had been so many protests in Nepal by older people, but in our ‘Gen-Z’ protest, they used guns”, Rawal said.

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