October 2, 2002	Wednesday	Rajab 24, 1423

CHENNAI, Oct 1: A Muslim militant shot by police commandos was given a hero’s burial on Tuesday by weeping relatives and admirers in the southern Indian city of Madurai, witnesses said.

Imam Ali, the key accused in the 1993 bombing of an office of the rightwing Hindu group Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, was killed along with four other people 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 kilometres south of Chennai, 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.

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.—AFP