A tribal rights organization and other experts said that it was too dangerous to recover the body of John Allen Chau, the American missionary who was killed on a remote Indian Ocean island.
Survival International recommended that Chau's remains should stay on North Sentinel Island, whose inhabitats killed him in an arrow attack on November 17.
Chau paid fishermen to take him close to the island and then used a kayak to paddle to shore, bringing gifts, including a football and fish.
Indian police are trying to find a way to recover his body amid a nervous standoff between officers and the island's tribe.
Police were met with hostility as they circled the island in a boat around 450 yards from the shore and spotted men armed with bows and arrows on the beach.
"They stared at us, and we were looking at them," said Dependra Pathak, police chief of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, of which North Sentinel is a part, Sky News reported.
He said that the authorities had to learn "the nuances of the group's conduct and behavior, particularly in this kind of violent behavior."
But Survival International Director Stephen Corry told the BBC that Chau's body should be left alone "as should the Sentinelese.
"The risk of a deadly epidemic of flu, measles or other outside disease is very real, and increases with every contact.
"Such efforts in similar cases in the past have ended with the Sentinelese attempting to defend their island by force," he said, adding that any attempt to retrieve the body would be "incredibly dangerous."
A group of experts, including anthropologists and authors, said in a joint statement that recovering the body could lead to further loss of life.
"The rights and the desires of the Sentinelese need to be respected, and nothing is to be achieved by escalating the conflict and tension, and worse, to creating a situation where more harm is caused," the statement said, as reported by The News Minute, an Indian online newspaper.
The Sentinelese tribe has lived on the island for about 60,000 years and has shunned all outside contact.
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