Nirmala Sitharaman leads mourners

Chennai: Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman performed the painful yet patriotic task of personally flying in the mortal remains of the two CRPF jawans belonging to her home state Tamil Nadu, killed in the Kashmir terror attack. She arrived by an IAF aircraft at Tiruchy at 11.05 am accompanied by her senior officials and supervised arrangements to receive the martyrs’ bodies.

Two IAF planes landed at Tiruchy 25 minutes later. One of them carried four caskets-belonging to martyrs G. Subramaniam and Sivachandran of Tamil Nadu, Vasanth Kumar of Kerala and Guru of Karnataka.

After paying homage to all the four martyrs at the airport, the Defence Minister arranged for the caskets of Vasanth Kumar and Guru to be loaded on to the IAF plane that had come empty and sent them to their places. While the body of Vasanth Kumar arrived at Calicut airport at 2.15 pm, the Guru’s casket reached Bengaluru at 3.40 pm. Union Minister Ananthakumar accompanied the two caskets in the IAF aircraft.

Nirmala Sitharaman led the large gathering of mourners, waving flags and raising slogans, to pay homage to Sivachandran at Tiruchy airport before the body was taken by road to his grieving family in Karkudi village of Ariyalur district.

The casket of G. Subramaniyam was flown by IAF aircraft to Madurai and taken to his house at Thoothukudi by road. Union Minister Pon Radhakrishnan received the casket at the Madurai airport and went along to Thoothukudi where he along with TN Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam led the mourners in paying homage to the martyr.