Indian man’s buried body exhumed in Saudi to send home for last rituals

Jeddah: In one of the rare cases, an NRI worker’s body was exhumed from a graveyard in Saudi Arabia where it was buried mistakenly two months ago. The Indian officials are working to repatriate it back home to India for last rites according to Hindu family tradition. The 42-year-old Andithamy Palanisamy, a native of Madurai […]

Jeddah: In one of the rare cases, an NRI worker’s body was exhumed from a graveyard in Saudi Arabia where it was buried mistakenly two months ago. The Indian officials are working to repatriate it back home to India for last rites according to Hindu family tradition.

The 42-year-old Andithamy Palanisamy, a native of Madurai district of Tamil Nadu, was working in a maintenance project. He had died of cardiac arrest on May 19 in desert town of Majmah near Riyadh.

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Vedatchi, wife of the deceased has requested the authorities concerned to repatriate her husband’s body. Accordingly, she sent notarised letter to the Indian embassy in Riyadh. Based on the request, the Embassy has issued NOC, a mandatory document in death cases of expatriates in abroad, for transportation of mortal remains of Palanisamy to India on June 14.

The transportation or burial of mortal remains of foreign employees is the responsibility of employers in Saudi Arabia and the rest of Gulf countries. However, instead of sending Palanisamy’s body to India, it was hastily buried in Shaqra cemetery on June 16.

The distraught family in Tamil Nadu came to know about the burial the following day and immediately approached the Indian Embassy with a plea to exhume the body and send it back to home. The Indian Embassy officials worked for over two months with different official entities to exhume the body. Finally, it was dug up and shifted to Riyadh city on Saturday.

Palanisamy’s body is expected to be repatriated soon to India, according to Indian community welfare officials.

Last year, A driver from Himachal Pradesh, Sanjeev Kumar’s death in Jizan province caught attention after his wife moved the Delhi High Court seeking help to retrieve her husband’s mortal remains and claimed that he was wrongly buried in Saudi Arabia and the issue came up for discussion in the State assembly.