The body of Japanese doctor Testu Nakamura who was killed in Afghanistan this week was flown to his home country on Saturday for burial.
A state funeral attended by President Ashraf Ghani and high-level officials was held for the 73-year-old physician who was killed in a shooting in eastern Nangarhar province on Wednesday.
His killing by unknown gunmen shocked many Afghans across the country.
At the airport, Ghani said that Nakamura had devoted his life to serving human beings. He vowed that his killers would be arrested and prosecuted.
The president said that Nakamura’s projects would be completed and named after him.
Born in western Japan, Nakamura trained as a doctor and answered a 1984 recruitment call to work in a clinic treating leprosy in the Peshawar city of Pakistan.
He began treating Afghan refugees who were pouring over the border in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led to him opening a clinic in that country in 1991.
On Thursday, a number of Afghan civil society activists gathered outside the Japanese embassy in Kabul for a candlelight vigil to pay tribute to Nakamura’s humanitarian engagements in Afghanistan.
Following a devastating 2000 drought which brought scores of starving and ill people to his clinic, he first helped bore wells and then came up with the idea of an irrigation canal, inspired by similarities between Japanese and Afghan rivers.
In 2003 – the same year Nakamura was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award, often called Asia’s Nobel – construction began. After six grueling years of labor, much of it by hand and in temperatures as high as 50 Celsius, the canal was finally completed.
Since then, some 16,000 hectares (40,000 acres) of desert has been brought back to life, making Nakamura such a widely revered figure in Afghanistan that earlier this year he became the first foreigner awarded Afghan citizenship.
