Thiruvananthapuram, Jan. 5: The last rites of Lieutenant Colonel E.K. Niranjan, the NSG commando who died during the Pathankot operation, were today performed at his ancestral home in Kerala with full state honours.

Thousands streamed into Elambulasseri, the Palakkad town where the 32-year-old's body was kept in a primary school today to enable the people to pay homage.

By noon, the body was shifted to his home where military and police teams paid tributes. After rituals lasting about half-an-hour, the body was consigned to flames in a pyre erected on the premises. The property has been vacant for the past 10 years as the family is now settled in Bangalore.

Home minister Ramesh Chennithala represented the state government at the funeral. Chief minister Oommen Chandy and some of his other cabinet colleagues visited the family last night.

The mortal remains of Lt Col Niranjan, who died over the weekend while removing explosives from a slain militant's booby-trapped body, was brought to Palakkad last evening from Bangalore.

Today, a man was arrested for posing as a journalist of Madhyamam, a Malayalam daily run by the state unit of Jamat-e-Islami, on Facebook. The 24-year-old had posted that Lt Col Niranjan's family would get a "job and money" and "the common man nothing".