Malaysian wins religion-tied battle over wife's body

By Clarence Fernandez

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A Malaysian has won a battle to give his dead wife a Christian funeral after Islamic religious authorities dropped their claim to the body on the grounds of her conversion to Islam.

The row over the corpse of Wong Sau Lan, a 54-year-old ethnic Chinese woman who died on Dec. 30, was the latest in a series of disputes in mostly Muslim Malaysia that have upset non-Muslims, who fear authorities are trampling on their religious rights.

"It was harrowing to wait for 18 days," said Ngiam Tee Kong, who was at his wife's bedside when she died in a Kuala Lumpur hospital and then suffered several sleepless nights during the custody fight for the remains.

"I'm definitely relieved. Hopefully it will be over in a few days."

Ngiam, 53, the manager of a snooker game centre, said his ordeal began the day his wife died of kidney failure, when police told him she had converted to Islam by reciting Arabic verses during a session with a traditional healer a week earlier.

But Ngiam, himself a Buddhist, challenged this version of events, maintained that his wife was a Christian baptised in November, and asked a Malaysian court to intervene.

"The high court has ordered that the body of the deceased be released to the husband forthwith," his lawyer Karpal Singh told reporters outside the court, adding that the body would be cremated according to Christian rites after a two-day wake.

"The Islamic affairs council has said the conversion of the deceased was not in accordance with Islamic law, and therefore they have no objections to the body being released to the husband," he said.