Sarabjit Singh finally home, in a coffin

Twenty-two years after he left the fields of Punjab and his beloved family, Sarabjit Singh finally came home on Thursday, but in a coffin and to an outpouring of grief and outrage. Sarabjit was murdered by fellow inmates in a Lahore jail in what Pakistan says was a scuffle but what many in India suspect was a premeditated attack.

Twenty-two years after he left the fields of Punjab and his beloved family, Sarabjit Singh finally came home on Thursday, but in a coffin and to an outpouring of grief and outrage.

Sarabjit was murdered by fellow inmates in a Lahore jail in what Pakistan says was a scuffle but what many in India suspect was a premeditated attack.

He was on death row there for his alleged role in bomb blasts in Lahore and Faisalabad two decades ago.

His family always maintained that he was innocent, a farmer who had strayed across the border in a drunken state on a fateful night in 1990.

A special Air India plane carrying his body touched down in Amritsar at 8.30pm, and he was then flown by helicopter to a site near his village of Bhikhiwind, where the Punjab government will give him a state funeral on Friday. Not a single home there lit a kitchen fire to prepare dinner; instead, grief-stricken villagers threw themselves into preparations for his last rites.

His death prompted an anguished reaction from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as well as Opposition anger at the government’s handling of the case, and threatened to worsen strained ties between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

An insensitive Pakistani bureaucracy delayed the release of the body by three hours at Lahore airport, adding to Indian indignation.