MADRAS, 2 October — A militant shot by police commandos was given a hero’s burial yesterday by weeping relatives and admirers in the southern city of Madurai.
Imam Ali, alias Harikumar, the key accused in the 1993 bombing of an office of the Hindu extremist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), was killed along with four others during a police raid on their hideout in Bangalore on Sunday.
Ali, 32, whose body was brought for burial to a mosque in Madurai, 400 km south of Madras, was also accused of plotting to assassinate Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani and other Hindu leaders and bomb temples in southern India.
The city police had billed Ali as the most-wanted Muslim militant in Tamil Nadu state.
Ali hails from a Hindu family that migrated to Madurai from Haripad in southern Kerala in the mid-1980s and converted to Islam. In early 1990s, he was associated with the Jihad Committee headed by Palani Baba, who was killed by RSS hit men in 1997.
A crowd of admirers and mourners, mostly local Muslims and relatives from Ali’s nearby hometown of Melur, chanted prayers, wept and shouted anti-police slogans as the slain militant’s bullet-ridden body arrived for burial.
They hoisted black flags on rooftops in the neighborhood of Sungampa in Madurai, witnesses said. The crowd mobbed two ambulances which brought the bodies of all five militants to the mosque and during the burial blocked journalists or policemen from entering.
A senior police official said he was surprised by the show of solidarity for Ali who had carried a reward of Rs. 500,000 on his head. The relatives had initially refused to take possession of the bodies and were so embarrassed that they covered their faces when they went to Bangalore to identify the dead, a senior official said.
