KATHMANDU: Nepali Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba issued a fresh appeal on Wednesday to Maoist rebels to start talks with the government to try to end a bloody revolt that has killed more than 10,000 people in the last eight years.

Deuba made the televised plea at the birthplace of Gautama Buddha, founder of Buddhism, while addressing a global Buddhist meeting in the impoverished Himalayan kingdom. Nepal needed a climate of peace for development, he said.

"His Majesty's Government, therefore, has kept the door open for dialogue and negotiations with Maoists," Deuba said from Lumbini, a village 300 km west of Kathmandu, where the Buddha was born more than 2,600 years ago.

"The indiscriminate killings of innocent people, abduction of schoolchildren, extortion, bomb blasts and destruction of infrastructure cannot win the hearts of the people," he said.

Deuba's peace plea came weeks before a government deadline that Kathmandu would go ahead with parliament elections planned for next April if rebels do not respond to offers for talks by Jan. 13. He made a similar call to the Maoists in November.

The rebels have vowed to disrupt the elections and have demanded elections to a constituent assembly that would prepare a new constitution and decide the future of the monarchy. Nepal has been without an elected parliament since 2002 because of threats by the rebels, who control large areas of the country.

Talks between the government and the Maoists in 2001 and 2003 failed amid rows over the role of the monarchy in a future political set-up. The rebels have been fighting to overthrow the constitutional monarchy and to set up a single-party communist republic in one of world's 10 poorest nations.

In Lumbini, in the southern rice-growing plains, soldiers guarded the village that is playing host to hundreds of Buddhist scholars and monks from more than 40 nations for the three-day World Buddhist Summit that started on Tuesday. On Monday, Maoist insurgents set off three bombs near Lumbini. No one was injured. -Reuters