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.