Nepali soldiers have killed 14 Maoist rebels in separate assaults across the Himalayan kingdom since Friday, the Defense Ministry said this afternoon.
A ministry spokesman said troops shot dead five Maoist insurgents in an encounter on Friday in Bardiya in west Nepal.
Six more were killed in the nearby Jajarkot, Sallyan and Parbat districts of west Nepal, the center of a bloody Maoist rebellion which has claimed more than 3,000 lives across the impoverished nation since 1996. The rest died elsewhere.
The rebels are trying to pull down the constitutional monarchy and set up a communist republic, saying the parliamentary democracy has failed to solve the poor nation's problems.
Nepal ordered out its soldiers to crush the guerrillas last November after they walked out of a peace process and attacked several security posts.