NEW DELHI, India (Reuters) -- Nepal's King Gyanendra will ultimately be exiled or executed because he has closed the door to any political compromise since seizing absolute power a year ago, the reclusive leader of the country's Maoist rebels said.
"The king has taken steps that do not give any room for compromise," Prachanda told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Monday. "It would be correct to say that the path that he has taken is the road to hell."
The Maoists have been fighting since 1996 to overthrow the world's only Hindu monarchy and install communist rule, a revolution that has killed at least 12,500 people and shattered the economy.
Prachanda, who has lived an underground existence for more than two decades, last year forged a loose alliance with the main political parties to topple the king and restore democracy.
"I believe that it (Nepal) will be a republic state in less than five years," Prachanda said in the interview, which the BBC said was the first he had ever given for television.
"The king, I think, will either be executed by the people's court or he might be exiled. For the king, today's Nepal has no future. We don't see a future for him and the Nepali people don't either. The king might be finished or he might leave."
It was not clear where the salt and pepper-bearded Prachanda, who was wearing a Western jacket and an open-neck shirt, was interviewed. Sitting against a black background, he spoke in Nepali through an interpreter.
Asked if the Maoists could take Nepal's capital, Kathmandu, by force, Prachanda said they had originally thought they could.
"But later, when countries like the U.S. the UK and India started supporting the royal army militarily against our people's war and the revolt of the Nepali people, that ... posed some difficulty," he said.
"That is why we believe that in today's world it's not possible only to move forward militarily. Today's reality is to move forward both politically and militarily, with a balance of the two."
He said the Maoists' recent commitment to multi-party democracy was not just a tactic, as some charge, and he was not pressing to become head of state himself.
"If need be, and if necessary for the Nepali people, I am of course ready for it. But I also want to clarify that from the lessons of the 20th-century communist states we want to move to a new plane in terms of leadership where one person doesn't remain the party leader or the head of state."
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