Three days after mysterious death, Sonali Phogat cremated in Haryana
Darpan News Desk IANS, 26 Aug, 2022 10:00 AM
Chandigarh, Aug 26 (IANS) Three days after her mysterious death, BJP leader and actress Sonali Phogat's last rites were performed on Friday in her hometown Hisar in Haryana by her family members and sympathisers.
Her 16-year-old daughter, Yashodhara, lit the funeral pyre amid the presence of a large number of people and leaders who turned up to pay their last respects.
The family demanded a probe into her death at a resort in Goa by the CBI.
Earlier, her body was brought to Hisar from Goa and kept at the civil hospital mortuary.
Wrapped in a BJP flag, the body was kept at her farmhouse at Dhandhoor village, 10 km from the district headquarters, to enable the people to pay respect.
Phogat started her career as a news anchor and later rose to fame on video hosting platform TikTok. She also acted in a few movies.
Haryana urban local bodies minister Kamal Gupta, the BJP MLA from Hisar, Kuldeep Bishnoi, who recently quit the Congress to join the BJP, Hisar mayor Gautam Sardana were present, among others.
The two leaders reviewed the situation, especially in the city of Kharkiv where many Indian students are stuck, and discussed the safe evacuation of Indian nationals from the conflict areas, an MEA statement said.
Officials said the administration was in touch with the families of 32 students belonging to the Jammu division who are stranded in Ukraine. Officials said nine evacuation flights have so far brought back around 2,000 Indians stranded in Ukraine since February 26.
Bhullar was convicted and sentenced to death in 2011 in the 1993 Delhi bomb blasts case. In March 2014, however, the Supreme Court commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment owing to his ill health.
An official in Guwahati said that the Assam government so far prepared a list of 160 such students and the process of evacuating them has been going on in coordination with the External Affairs Ministry.
Addressing a virtual press conference from Romania, he said that over 4,000 students will be evacuated in the next three days. He said that six flights were operated from Bucharest to India on Wednesday.
