Kiran Singh, a former mayor of Kapilvastu Municipality who had been missing since Friday evening, was found dead in a forest on Sunday.

Singh’s body was found around 600 to 700 metres north of where he was last traced, according to police. Residents found the body at around noon.

Singh, 65, had gone missing from the Dhekhari forest in Buddhbhumi Municipality along the Taulihawa-Gorusinge road. His family and locals had been searching for him since Friday evening.

Police on Saturday deployed a trained sniffer dog from a unit of Gautam Buddha International Airport and used drones to search the forest, but could not locate him.

Singh, a resident of Dhewangadhiya in ward 3 of Kapilvastu Municipality, was elected mayor of the municipality from the Nepali Congress in 2017. He had previously served as deputy mayor after being elected in the 1997 local elections.

He lost the mayoral election in the 2022 local elections.

Singh had been travelling to Dhekhari as he prepared to establish a commercial farm there.