A UK-website run by Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's grandnephew and journalist Ashish Ray has released the evidence given by a Taiwanese official who claimed to have prepared Netaji's body for cremation after his death in a plane crash in 1945. The website www.bosefiles.info has been chronicling the last days of Subhash Chandra Bose.
The testimony, contained in UK Foreign Office file No FC1852/6 and dating back to 1956, is among the last few documents to be released by www.bosefiles.info set up to establish that the Indian freedom fighter died in the crash on the outskirts of an airfield in Taipei on August 18, 1945.
There has been controversy for decades as to whether the account of the plane crash is true, despite two Indian government investigations concluding that is how Bose met his end.
In response, CK Yen, Chairman of the Taiwan Provincial Government, sent a detailed police report dated June 27, 1956. This included an interview with Tan Ti-Ti, who said the cremation took place on August 22, 1945.
The previous day August 21, 1945 the same Japanese officer, according to Tan Ti-Ti, "submitted the death certificate of a certain Ichiro Okura." Yen clarified to Franklin that during World War II in the case of military personnel (Bose was then Supreme Commander of the Indian National Army) without family members in Taiwan, "permission for cremation was granted on the strength of a certificate from a military hospital."