Less than two months after parliament took a revolutionary decision, saying the king's first-born would inherit the crown irrespective of sex, a Nepali weekly has reported wife-battering by King Gyanendra's son-in-law Raj Bahadur Singh, a commoner who became a millionaire after the royal alliance.

According to the Jana Aastha weekly, Singh, who married Princess Prerana three years ago in a fairy-tale wedding reported by the media worldwide, has ended the honeymoon and taken to laying hands on her.

Last week, when members of the royal family gathered to celebrate Teej, a women's festival, fresh evidence of Singh's abuse was discovered, the weekly said.

As the women were helping one another put on their gladrags and make-up for the festival, they discovered lacerations on the married princess' head. They also found her hair had been pulled out by the root in clumps, the weekly said.

According to telecom trade unions, the royalist government shut down the services of the state-owned Nepal Telecom to promote the mobile telephone firm in which Singh was the chairman.

Controversial Crown Prince Paras, known for his quick temper, has been dogged by such rumours since his marriage to Himani, who comes from a former royal family in India.

After a tiff with her at a trendy disco in the capital, the heir to the throne pulled out his gun and fired shots in the air. Another altercation between the couple, which necessitated a visit to the military hospital in Kathmandu by the crown princess, triggered a rumour that she had been killed.

The rumour spread like wildfire, making the palace send out the couple on a visit to a public place so that the state media could cover it and prove she was alive.

In Nepal's feudal society, multi-marriages, wife beating and abandoning one's wife and children are common occurrences overlooked by the law. Most cases of wife battering and domestic violence go unreported in Nepal.

Saathi, an NGO conducted a research in 2000 to come up with the finding that 66 percent of women in Nepal live with verbal abuse and 33 percent with emotional abuse.

In 2001, a Unicef study confirmed the findings. Three years later, the Nepal Human Development Report mentioned domestic violence as a serious but unaddressed problem.

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