The mountainous little Himalayan country of Nepal exploded into the headlines last week on the strength of an incident as bizarre, as mysterious -- and as bloody -- as the final scene of "Hamlet." On Friday, June 1, Nepal's King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev was shot to death along with his wife and seven other family members during a dinner at the royal palace in Katmandu. The country has been in a state of near-crisis since then; indeed, as the days pass without clarification of what happened, or why, or even who was responsible for the shootings, the Nepalese people's unease and frustration have mounted. By midweek, protesters had taken to the streets. It is to be hoped that those who are already predicting a total political and constitutional collapse in the wake of the tragedy are not proved right.

Unfortunately, the omens for a swift resolution of the crisis are not good. In the first place, the scene itself is murky with unanswered questions and competing accusations.

An early suspect was the king's own son, 29-year-old Crown Prince Dipendra, who was said to be unhappy about his mother's opposition to his choice of bride and who eyewitnesses say indiscriminately opened fire on his family with an Uzi submachine gun and an M-16 assault rifle. Given these accounts, the world, like the Nepalese themselves, was baffled to learn that the crown prince had been declared his father's successor over the weekend. Not that this counted for much: The prince had been in a coma since the incident, supposedly after turning his weapons on himself, and he died on Monday without regaining consciousness. His uncle, Prince Gyanendra, Birendra's brother, was then named king and immediately ordered a probe into the massacre.