Gladys Staines Leaves India ‘Temporarily’ For Australia

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While leaving, she said she wanted to spend more time with her 91-year-old father and her teenage daughter who wanted to study in an Australian university. "I feel totally exhausted. I need time to reflect," she told journalists in Mumbai.

She said she would come back to visit and keep her work going – last week she inaugurated a new 10-bed hospital named after her husband.

Staines added that she held nothing against India. "I take back a lot of love from the people of this country," she said.

Graham and couple’s two sons, Philip, 10, and Timothy, eight, were burned alive by a mob in Mayurbhanj’s Keonjhar district in Orissa on the night of January 22 1999.

She and her husband were working with leprosy patients in Mayurbhanj in a hospital when he and his sons were burnt to death by a mob while they were sleeping in their jeep in January 1999.

Last year an Indian court sentenced one man to death and 12 others to life imprisonment over the killings.

The man who was sentenced to death over the murders, Dara Singh, is said to have led a militant campaign against Christians and Muslims.

However an investigation has found no evidence that hardline Hindu groups organised the attack on the Staines.

During the trial, Staines said she had forgiven the killers.

Graham Staines came to Rairangpur first as a missionary of the EMSM in 1965 and then shifted to Baripada where he was actively working for the betterment of leprosy afflicted people till his death in 1999.

Graham Staines had spent 30 years working with leprosy patients in Orissa. He met Gladys in India in the early 1980s and they were married in 1983.

Both of them continued to work among leprosy patients in Mayurbhanj, a very poor district in the eastern state of Orissa.

The Staines died when the jeep they were sleeping in was torched outside a church in the remote village of Manoharpur in Orissa in January 1999.

The killings sparked condemnation in India and around the world. Amid international condemnation of the gruesome murder, it was Gladys's restraint that stood out.

"I hope the people who have done this are touched by the love of god and never do this to anybody else," said the distraught widow in the year 1999.

Gladys later began work on a hospital named after her husband, the Graham Staines Memorial Hospital, which is now complete and handed over to the Christian Fellowship Hospital of Dindigal, Karnataka.

Gladys says she is leaving India for personal reasons. Her father is 91-years-old and her daughter wants to go to college in Australia.

She however, adds that she will be back.

"I do not know whether I will come back temporarily or permanently but I will definitely be back," said Gladys.

However, what she leaves behind her are better health care facilities and a ray of hope for leprosy patients in Orissa.

Meanwhile, amidst inquiries as to whether she was returning to Australia "for good", sources at the Evangelical Missionary Society of Mayurbhanj (EMSM) in Orissa capital Bhubaneshwar said Gladys was accompanying her daughter Esther down under where she wanted to study medicine.

She will be away on "furlough" granted by the society registered in Australia. Furlough enables a missionary on a foreign assignment to go home for a period of six to eight months", an EMSM spokesman at Baripada said.

Esther is virtually a stranger to Australia as she was born and brought up in India, the spokesman said adding Gladys would be with her "for the time being".

The first phase of the Graham Staines Memorial Hospital was inaugurated at Baripada a week ago where Gladys described it as the missionary's 'dream project'.