Hero police officer died saving tsunami victims

Police paid tribute today to an officer who helped save hundreds of people on his remote island in India during the tsunami disaster, then was swept away while trying to help one last person, an old woman who asked him to retrieve her handbag.

Sanjeev Kumar, 30, a police officer on duty the day the tsunami struck, was one of the first people on his small island of Katchall to see the giant waves coming.

First, he called his superiors on the phone to warn them, then he ordered his wife, Deepika, and one-year-old daughter, Nisha, to run from up a hill from a low-lying coastal area to the Murugan temple, said his wife, who spent two days on a motorboat travelling to Port Blair for the tribute.

“He was so cool and calm in spite of the danger,” Deepika Kumar said in a tearful interview in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Running across the shoreline, he screamed out to many other people, and about 600 of them raced to safety in the temple compound and huddled there as a series of towering waves crashed into the island. The Boxing Day tsunami killed at least 1,205 people on the isolated island chain in the Bay of Bengal and left 5,531 missing.

At one point, the officer grabbed four children, two in each hand, and carried them up the hillside. Later, he led one last old woman to safety.

Just as the officer joined everyone else on the hilltop, the old woman said she had left her handbag behind, containing a plastic icon of a god, and she asked him to recover it.

“I screamed behind him, asking him not to go,” Kumar said. “He just waved his hand and told me to go back to the temple. Another wave came in and I only saw him on top of it. He was washed away.”

Senior police officers met with Kumar and her daughter and held a brief tribute today to the fallen hero.

“Sanjeev was one of our best officers, young and brave,” said A.K. Singh, the superintendent of police.