Kathmandu, Aug. 21 -- Fifteen years after 500 blank travel documents disappeared from the Foreign Ministry's store section, a chargesheet filed at the Kathmandu District Court has forced investigators to reopen a case they had left unresolved.

Last month, the District Attorney's Office in Kathmandu filed a case against Pushpa Raj Bhattarai, a joint secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, over the illegal issuance of travel documents to five Tibetan refugees back in 2009. The case followed a years-long investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CIB), which the foreign ministry had asked to look into the matter in October 2011 - after a German Embassy official flagged, in 2010, that recently arrived Tibetan refugees appear...