(Top) Prachanda and his father Muktiram Dahal

Kathmandu, May 31 (Reuters): The elusive chief of Nepal’s Maoist rebels met his father for the first time in seven years in an emotional reunion when the guerrilla leader made a rare public appearance in the south of the Himalayan nation.

Muktiram Dahal, 77, said he met his son Prachanda at a Maoist rally in a school surrounded by forests at Handikhola, 100 km south Kathmandu on Monday.

“My heart was filled with suffocation due to happiness when I saw him,” Dahal, a peasant, said by phone today from Bharatpur, a small riverside town 150 km southwest of Kathmandu, where he lives.

“I was crying with joy inside my heart but I kept smiling outside,” he said.

The bespectacled and feared Prachanda has led a decade-old war to replace Nepal’s monarchy with a communist republic. More than 13,000 people have been killed in the revolt so far.

“First, he greeted me and inquired about my condition,” Dahal said. “Then he asked about the family. So it went.”

Dahal has eight children including two sons and Prachanda, 52, is the eldest. The rebel chief is married and has three daughters and a son.

Dahal briefly met Prachanda seven years ago.

The Maoists have been organising public rallies across the country to publicise their political agenda after the government this month matched a truce declared by them.

On Monday, Dahal sat on a straw mat with Prachanda and had lentils, boiled rice and goat meat for the dinner and spent the night with him.

“There were many guerrillas carrying arms guarding the site during the rally and through the night. But it was not scary.”