Indian police face-off with tribe in missionary killing

PORT BLAIR, India: Indian officers had a nervous longdistance face-off with the tribe who killed an American missionary, in their latest bid to locate his body on a remote island, police said Sunday.

The police team, who took a boat just off Indian-owned North Sentinel island on Saturday, spotted men from the Sentinelese tribe on the beach where John Allen Chau was last seen, the region’s police chief Dependra Pathak told AFP.

Using binoculars, officers – in a police boat about 400 metres from the shore – saw the men armed with bows and arrows, the weapons reportedly used by the isolated tribe to kill Chau as he shouted Christian phrases at them.

“They stared at us and we were looking at them,” said Pathak. The boat withdrew to avoid any chance of a confrontation.

Police are taking painstaking efforts to avoid any disruption to the Sentinelese – a pre-neolithic tribe whose island is off-limits to outsiders – as they seek Chau’s body.

The death of the 27-yearold on Nov 17 has cast a new spotlight on efforts to protect one of the world’s last “uncontacted” tribes whose language and customs remain a mystery to outsiders.

Fishermen who took Chau to North Sentinel – which is one of the Andaman and Nicobar islands in the Bay of Bengal – said they saw the tribe burying the body on the beach. — AFP