Army man's remains to reach Kochi

KOTTAYAM: More than 24 years after he died, the remains of second lieutenant E Thomas Joseph, who laid down his life fighting insurgents in Nagaland, will be finally brought home on Thursday. His remains will be received with military honours at the Cochin airport at 1.30pm. Thomas was killed in an encounter by insurgents in 1992 and was buried in Nagaland.A few days ago, his parents and two sisters had gone to the north-eastern state to bring back the soldier's remains for burial at the cemetery at their home parish at Kanjiramattom in Kottayam. Thomas was buried at a church in Chakabama in Nagaland but all these years his family could never fully reconcile that they could not even attend his last rites.
It was the silver jubilee reunion of Thomas's batch in Indian Military Academy that gave his family a chance to go to Nagaland and locate his grave. The reunion decided to present a memento to families of martyrs in the batch, for which the batchmates traced the family to Kottayam after much hard work. Besides locating the grave, the batch-mates also arranged free air tickets for the family.