Apparently the body of the missionary killed by the Andaman Islanders will not be retrieved, WaPo reports:
The fishermen have been arrested, as has a friend of Chau’s who helped organize the boat trip. Police have no strategy to retrieve his body and don’t plan to confront the islanders, Pathak said.
To this agnostic, his diary entries sound quite disrespectful of the natives:
Chau spent years planning and training to travel illegally to remote North Sentinel Island on a mission to convert its residents to Christianity, including learning emergency medicine, and studying linguistics and cultural anthropology, his missionary group said. Though he knew the islanders had long violently resisted outsiders, he conducted a covert mission to the protected island this month. …
“God, I don’t want to die,” Chau scrawled in his journal while sitting in a fishing boat off the coast of the island where the North Sentinelese people live, shortly before he was killed. “WHO WILL TAKE MY PLACE IF I DO?” …
“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?” he wrote.
By the third day, he became convinced he was going to die.
“Watching the sunset and it’s beautiful — crying a bit . . . wondering if it will be the last sunset I see,” he wrote.
I’m appalled, actually.
