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Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : MISCELLANY / NEWSMAKERS AND MILESTONES

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Times staff writers Gary Jarlson, Lorena Oropeza and Barry Surman compiled the Week in Review stories

To Rajesh Kumar, who was escorting his 80-year-old grandmother and an aunt on their first trip away from the family village near Bombay, India, it was wrong that terrorists should take over a Pan Am jetliner at Karachi, Pakistan.

Witnesses said that when the gunmen called out the names of passengers, who then fled to the rear of the Boeing 747, Kumar had stood and shouted, “I am an American citizen and you can’t do this.”

Those aboard said he was led to the front of the plane where he was shot in the back of the head and thrown to the tarmac below. He died later at a hospital and his grandmother would also die as police stormed the plane to end the 16-hour ordeal that had begun on Sept. 5.

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Kumar, 29, of Huntington Beach and his grandmother were mourned nine days later in a memorial service attended by 400 friends and relatives, some from as far away as India, Africa and Great Britain.

Kumar, who worked in his family’s motel business, had become a U.S. citizen July 11, more than eight years after his family came to United States as tourists.

The memorial ceremony was marred by a near-riot as relatives and friends of Kumar’s estranged wife prevented the hearses and limousines from leaving the Westminster chapel until she could review the bodies.

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