Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Malaysia sought to defuse religious tensions on Wednesday, asking the state's top lawyer to investigate the case of a hospital that had refused to release a Muslim convert's body to his Christian widow.
The widow, 69-year-old Lourdes Mary Maria Soosay, wants a court to order hospital authorities to hand over the body of her 71-year-old husband, van driver Rayappan Anthony, whose religious beliefs at the time of his death last week are in question.
Islamic religious authorities want the man buried according to Muslim rites, but his family says he renounced Islam and resumed practising Christianity in 1999.
On Wednesday, Malaysia's Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said the government would ask Attorney-General Abdul Gani Patail to examine the issue and return the body to the family if it proved not to be Muslim.
"The issue was discussed in cabinet," Abdullah told reporters in reply to a question soon after a weekly cabinet meeting.
"Cabinet agreed to surrender it to the attorney-general. This is because it is important to ascertain the status of the person. If he's a non-Muslim, surrender him to his family."
The hospital's refusal to give the body to the widow, because she planned to give her husband a Christian burial, had triggered fresh religious controversy.
It is the second time in about a year that a non-Muslim has fought for funeral rights over a loved one. In the first, state Islamic officials gave a former soldier a Muslim burial against the wishes of his Hindu widow, setting off a storm of protest.
Whether Muslims can convert to another faith is a tricky legal question in Malaysia where freedom of religion is a constitutional right, though Islam is the official religion.
Ethnic Malays, who make up just over half of a population of 26 million, are deemed to be Muslims from birth, but the country's highest civil court has yet to rule on whether they have the right to convert to another religion.