Sir Edmund Hillary Will Be Honoured With State Funeral
Sir Edmund Hillary Will Be Honoured With State Funeral
Everest conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary, who has died at the age of 88, will be given a state funeral on January 22 in his home city Auckland, Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Saturday.

Tributes to Hillary, who died Friday of a heart attack, shortly before he was due to be released from hospital after treatment for pneumonia, have poured in from all over the world.

They ranged from a message to his widow and two children from Britain's Queen Elizabeth, who was crowned on the day Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay climbed Everest, May 29, 1953, to a Nepalese family living in Auckland.

Arrangements for the funeral were finalized with Lady June Hillary when Clark returned to Auckland after a holiday in Europe.

His body will lie in state at Holy Trinity Cathedral in the Auckland suburb of Parnell, and the funeral service will be held at the adjacent St Mary's Church.

Services will also be held in Kathmandu and at a village near Mount Everest, where Hillary is revered for his work in raising money and building schools and hospitals for the Sherpa people.

A memorial service will be held Sunday at New Zealand's Scott Base in Antarctica, which Hillary helped establish 51 years ago, and Don McKinnon, secretary-general of the British Commonwealth of nations, said that a service was likely to be held in London.

Flags flew at half mast throughout New Zealand. The national cricket team wore black arm bands in Hillary's memory as they played Bangladesh in a test match in Wellington, and a minute's silence was observed before play began.

A statue of Hillary in the village at Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest mountain in the Southern Alps, where he began his mountaineering career, was adorned with flowers and a black armband placed on it on Saturday.



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