Police on Friday buried five militants who attacked the Indian Parliament and were killed in the gunbattle as they tried to storm the building last month.
The funeral rites were conducted by clerics of the New Delhi Wakf Board, a Muslim welfare body, in a cemetery amid tight security.
Dozens of armed policemen surrounded the cemetery in a predominantly Muslim area of Delhi and prevented people from entering. The burials took place after sundown and police used halogen lamps to light the area.
"The unclaimed bodies were given to us by the police. These were buried according to Islamic rites," said Qazi Azhar Ahmed, chief executive of the board.
New Delhi police chief Ajai Raj Sharma had said last week that the bodies would be buried if Pakistan did not claim them before January 10. Pakistan refused to claim the bodies. Placed in wooden caskets, the five embalmed bodies were brought to the cemetery loaded on two trucks from a Delhi hospital morgue where they had been kept since the December 13 attack on the Indian Parliament.
India has been maintaining that the five slain men were Pakistani nationals and had asked Pakistan to take their bodies and return them to their families. Pakistan had said that the five were not Pakistani nationals.
Fourteen people, including the five assailants, were killed in the attack. India accused Pakistan's ISI of sponsoring the assault, a claim that Islamabad has denied. Bureau Report