India | Officials cautious as they look to recover American body

Indian officials have traveled repeatedly in recent days near the remote island where an American missionary was killed by people who have long resisted the outside world. But they have not set foot onto North Sentinel Island since the killing, and it remains unclear if they will.

“They are a treasure,” Dependera Pathak, director-general of police on the Andaman and Nicobar island groups, said of the Sentinelese people. “We cannot go and force our way in. We don’t want to harm them.”

The Sentinelese, who scholars believe are descendants of Africans who migrated to the area about 50,000 years ago, survive on the small, forested island by hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants. Almost nothing is known of their lives, except that they attack outsiders with spears or bows and arrows.

American John Allen Chau was killed by islanders in mid-November after paying fishermen to smuggle him to the island, where outsiders are effectively forbidden by Indian law. The fishermen told authorities that they saw the Sentinelese bury Chau’s body on the beach. The notes Chau left behind say he wanted to bring Christianity to the islanders.

A boat carrying police and other officials approached North Sentinel on Friday and Saturday, watching the Sentinelese through binoculars. On Saturday the tribesmen were armed with spears and bows and arrows, but they did not attempt to shoot them at the authorities, Pathak said.

“We watched them from a distance and they watched us from a distance,” he said.

Officials have not given up on recovering the body, he said. But they are moving very gingerly, studying the 2006 killing of fishermen whose boat had drifted onto the island.

“We are looking carefully at what happened then, and what [the Sentinelese] did,” he said. “We are consulting anthropologists to see what kind of friendly gesture we can make.”

The islanders buried the two fishermen on the beach in 2006, but dug up the corpses after a few days and propped them upright. Authorities apparently never recovered those bodies, and the killings were never investigated.

There has been no significant contact with the Sentinelese for generations. Anthropologists used to occasionally drop off gifts of coconuts and bananas, but even those visits were stopped years ago.

Anthropologist P.C. Joshi said he understands why authorities want to recover the body.

“If there is a death, then the cause of death should be known. It’s important,” said Joshi, a professor at Delhi University.

“Of course, we can’t prosecute” the islanders if they killed Chau, he said. Plus, he noted, it may already be too late to learn much from the body, since the heat and humidity on North Sentinel will cause rapid decomposition.

“Ultimately, it’s becoming futile,” he said.

TEN YEARS AFTER

MUMBAI ATTACK

As Mumbai marked the 10th anniversary of attacks that killed 166 in India’s financial capital yesterday, the United States made a new reward offer for information on the 2008 siege.

The Pakistani gunmen who waged the attack were killed or captured.

But U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that those who planned the attack had not been convicted. He called on Pakistan to implement sanctions against those responsible and said the U.S. was offering a new USD5 million reward and was committed to seeing those responsible face justice.

On Nov. 26, 2008, gunmen staged coordinated attacks in the heart of Mumbai. They targeted two luxury hotels, a Jewish center, a tourist restaurant and a crowded train station in three days of carnage.

India blamed the attack on the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, throwing relations between the nuclear- armed neighbors into a tailspin. Indian officials accused Pakistan’s intelligence agency of working with the militant group to mastermind the attack — an allegation Islamabad denied.

“We call upon all countries, particularly Pakistan, to uphold their U.N. Security Council obligations to implement sanctions against the terrorists responsible for this atrocity, including Lashkar-e-Taiba and its affiliates,” Pompeo said in a statement.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi paid tribute to those who lost their lives in the attacks.

“Our solidarity with the bereaved families. A grateful nation bows to our brave police and security forces who valiantly fought the terrorists during the Mumbai attacks,” he said in a statement. MDT/AP