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 ¡ª with his hands up ¡ª 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, said as he lay on a bed in the capital Kathmandu's Civil Service Hospital.