India probes 'hasty cremation'

By Asit Jolly
BBC correspondent in Chandigarh

The chief minister of the northern Indian state of Punjab has ordered an inquiry into the circumstances that led to the hasty cremation of the body of a popular Muslim Kashmiri singer.

Ghulam Nabi Sheikh (r) had an army of fans in Kashmir

The singer, Ghulam Nabi Sheikh, died after falling off a Delhi-bound train on Sunday night.

His body was recovered by railway police and cremated within 10 hours, after being declared unidentified.

Muslims customarily bury their dead and the cremation has provoked an outcry in Kashmir.

Absence not noticed

On Friday, Punjab's Chief Minister Amarinder Singh said the high-level inquiry would be led by railway police superintendent Surinder Singh Sidhu.

Pending the completion of the inquiry, two officials directly responsible for cremating the singer's body without making any attempt to identify it, have been suspended.

The singer's relatives were outraged by the police actions

Mr Sheikh was travelling with his daughter and a family friend, when he apparently went out of his compartment for a smoke and fell off the train as it was moving through Punjab.

With his companions and most other passengers asleep, his absence was not noticed until the train reached Delhi.

Railway police personnel in Punjab discovered Mr Sheikh's dead body on Monday morning and - in the absence of any identification - cremated it after a post-mortem examination.

It was only later, when Mr Sheikh's daughter lodged a complaint that her father was missing that railway police officials confirmed the recovery of the body.

This was later positively identified as the singer on the basis of photographs of the corpse.

The fact that the Punjab officials made no attempt to try and identify the body before wrongly consigning it to flames, has provoked a number of protests from the singer's family, friends and many fans.