The exhumation of Ngah Ibrahim

7 September 2006 (The New Paper and The Star) – The exhumation of the graves of Ngah Ibrahim and Laksamana Mohd Amin Alang were caried out earlier today. Reports were published in both Singapore (New Paper) and Malaysia (The Star). The New Paper is a tabloid, hence the mildly sensational and attention-grabbing headline and almost sob-story:

I was close to tears

THE two men were figures in Malaysian history.
In the 19th century, they resisted the British rule and played key roles in the murder of Perak’s first British resident, Mr J W W Birch, in 1875.

That year, Tengku Menteri Ngah Ibrahim and his father-in-law, Laksamana (Admiral in Malay) Mohd Amin Alang were banished from Perak by the British and eventually ended up in Singapore. Their tombs were long forgotten.

The search for their tombs by relatives yielded nothing.

But after more than a century, all it took was someone to trip on a headstone to find one of the tombs.

Tengku Menteri Ngah’s great-grandson, Datuk Dr [tag]Wan Mohd Isa Wan Ahmad[/tag], 61, was about to give up searching for his ancestor’s burial site when he made the accidental discovery.

Datuk Isa, territorial chief of Larut, Matang and Selama districts in Perak, said: ‘I was ready to give up. We were about to leave when I suddenly felt this urge to walk to a corner of the graveyard.’

That was when he tripped over a large broken headstone. He picked it up and read the inscription.

He said: ‘I was close to tears. I had been waiting for this moment for so long. I felt so happy.

From The Star:

Preparing for heroes’ homecoming

The remains of Perak heroes Tengku Menteri Ngah Ibrahim of Larut and Laksamana Mohd Amin Alang of Hilir Perak, buried in two Muslim cemeteries in Singapore, will be exhumed today.

The National Heritage Department will start the exercise with the exhumation of Laksamana Mohd Amin’s remains at Pusara Aman in Choa Chu Kang at 9am.

Ngah Ibrahim’s remains will be exhumed an hour later at the Al-Junied Muslim Cemetery in Jalan Kubor.