Missionary told island tribe ‘Jesus loves you’

An American missionary killed in a hail of arrows by an island tribe untouched by modern civilisation was bent on converting them to Christianity, it emerged yesterday. John Allen Chau, 27, was attacked last week as he illegally set foot on the remote North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean, after paddling his kayak towards the shore carrying fish and a football as gifts, according to a journal quoted by different media.

He was crying: “My name is John. I love you and Jesus loves you... Here is some fish!” Tribespeople fired arrows at him, one of then piercing his Bible, and he returned to a fishermen’s boat and spent the night writing about his experiences before going back to the island the next day. He never returned. North Sentinel in the Bay of Bengal is home to the Sentinelese people, believed to number only around 150.

To protect their way of life, foreigners and Indians are banned from going within five kilometres (three miles) of the island. Chau called himself an “outbound collective explorer” and “snakebite survivor” on his purported Instagram account. “You guys might think I’m crazy in all this but I think it’s worthwhile to declare Jesus to these people,” the reports quoted a letter to his parents as saying. “Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed,” he said. 

“I can’t wait to see them around the throne of God worshipping in their own language as Revelations 7:9-10 states,” he wrote, referring to the apocalyptic final book of the Bible’s New Testament. “God, I don’t want to die.” Fishermen saw the tribe burying his body on the beach the following day, a fellow missionary wrote in an email to his mother, the Washington Post reported.