Malaysian Islamic authorities in new corpse row: report
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) — Malaysian police have seized the body of an ethnic Chinese man in the latest dispute between Islamic authorities and family members over a disputed conversion, a report said Monday.
The eldest son of Gan Eng Gor, who died on Sunday aged 74, said his father became a Muslim last July, but his other children reject the claim and insist their father was a Buddhist.
The dispute comes just days after a court ordered a Christian woman's body be returned to her family after Islamic authorities admitted they were wrong in claiming she had converted.
The cases have fed accusations over the growing "Islamisation" of Malaysia, where the population is dominated by Muslim Malays living alongside ethnic Chinese and Indian communities.
Police reportedly took Gan's body from a funeral parlour outside Kuala Lumpur after his eldest son, who became a Islam several years ago, lodged a report claiming his father had converted and taken a Muslim name.
"The entire family is shocked at his claim," Gan Hock Sin, one of the deceased man's eight other children, said according to The Star daily.
"We have been practising Buddhists all our lives. How is it that none of us, including my mother who has been looking after my sick father for the past two years, has no knowledge of this?" he said.
"He could not talk, so how was it possible that he converted?" Gan Hock Sin said, adding that his father had been bedridden for the past two years after suffering a stroke.
The report said that a state Islamic Affairs official had arrived at the funeral parlour with copies of a certificate of conversion dated July 3, and that a religious court would hear the case on Monday.
About 60 percent of Malaysia's 27 million people are ethnic Malay Muslims. The rest are mostly ethnic Chinese and Indians who are largely Buddhists, Hindus and Christians.
