Man turns up two months after burial in Kazakhstan
NEW YORK: A man who was thought to be dead has turned up at his family’s home two months after they apparently buried him. Aigali Supygaliev, from Kazakhstan, was pronounced dead after DNA tests on badly burned human remains proved with “with 99.2% certainty” that they were his. Authorities issued an official death certificate and he was “buried” in September in the Muslim cemetery of Tomarly, his family’s home town just north of the Caspian Sea port of Atyrau. Aigali, 63, had left home one June morning and didn’t come back. “Aigali had been known to wander off for a week of two before,” his sibling said. So, when Aigali walked through the door two months later, he had some explaining to do. It turns out that he had taken up an offer of work in a nearby village from a man he’d met down the market that fateful day. Once the work was finished, four months later Aigali walked all the way back to Tomarly. Neither the police nor the regional justice department were available for comment on the story. The forensic scientist who carried out the DNA analysis told Azh.kz that she stood by her 99.2% findings, “but you must never forget that other 0.8%”. The Supygalievs, who had paid for a tombstone, commissioned a stone shrine over the grave in the Kazakh tradition and even returned pension payments for the two months that Aigali was “dead”, are considering legal action. (Agencies)
Nigeria’s ‘Mona Lisa’ shown for first time since it resurfaced
LAGOS: The Nigerian Mona Lisa, a painting lost for more than 40 years and found in a London flat in February, is being exhibited in Nigeria for the first time since it disappeared. “Tutu”, an art work by Nigeria’s best-known modern artist, Ben Enwonwu, was painted in 1974. It appeared at an art show in Lagos the following year, but its whereabouts after that were unknown, until it re-surfaced in north London. The owners – who wished to remain anonymous – had called in Giles Peppiatt, an expert in modern and contemporary African art at the London auction house Bonhams, to identify their painting. He recognized Enwonwu’s portrait. “It was discovered by myself on a pretty routine valuation call to look at a work by Ben Enwonwu,” said Giles Peppiatt, director of contemporary African art at Bonhams. “I didn’t know what I was going to see. I turned up, and it was this amazing painting. We’d had no inkling ‘Tutu’ was there. How it got there remains a bit of a mystery, Peppiatt said. “All the family that owned it know is that it was owned by their father, who had business interests in Nigeria. He traveled and picked it up in the late or mid-70s.” The family put the portrait up for sale, and it was auctioned for 1.2 million pounds ($1.57 million) in February to an anonymous buyer. The sale made it the highest-valued work of Nigerian modern art sold at auction. “Tutu is referred to as the African ‘Mona Lisa’ by virtue of this disappearance and re-emergence, and it is the first work of a modern Nigerian artist to sell for over a million pounds,” said Tokini Peterside, the art fair’s founder. (Reuters)