Infamous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly has had his final wish granted 131 years after being executed, with officials agreeing to release his remains so he can be buried with his family.
Anthony Griffiths, a grandson of Kelly’s sister, said yesterday that Victoria state Attorney-General Robert Clark had decided to return his bullet-ridden body to his descendants so they could meet his last request.
“That’s very welcome news indeed,” Griffiths told reporters. “Our family, like every family, likes to be able to bury their own family members. Our aim is to give him a dignified funeral, like any family would.”
Kelly’s headless remains were finally identified in September, solving a longstanding mystery.
Considered by some to be a cold-blooded killer, Kelly was also seen as a folk hero and symbol of Irish-Australian defiance against the British authorities for taking on corrupt police and greedy land barons.
After murdering three policemen, he was captured in Victoria state in 1880 and hanged at Old Melbourne Gaol in November of the same year. However, his body went missing after it was thrown into a mass grave.
The day before he died, Kelly wrote to the governor of the gaol asking “permission for my friends to have my body that they might bury it in consecrated ground,” according to the Melbourne Herald Sun newspaper.
He is likely to laid to rest in a small cemetery near Glenrowan, where he was killed and where his mother Ellen, several of his brothers and sisters and other relatives are buried in unmarked graves, reports said.
The exploits of Kelly and his gang have been the subject of numerous films and television series.
Rolling Stone Mick Jagger played the lead role in the 1970 movie Ned Kelly, while Heath Ledger starred as the bandit in a 2003 remake.
He has also been the inspiration for many books, most notably Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang, which won the 2001 Booker Prize.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS