Spooky: Lavish Funeral Cancelled Because 'Coffin Was Empty'
There was a horse-drawn hearse, two luxury vintage cars, men in top hats, a complete choir and a church full of photographs of a young man. A director was present who filmed the tragic day.
The funeral was for Lauris Zaube (picture right), a handsome and tall 23-year-old young man who left a New Year's Eve party at the Pēterstraupes guesthouse in Straupciems, Latvia, at around 3.30am and disappeared into the freezing night without a jacket.
The place is surrounded by water. Zaube was not suicidal.
There were two groups of people in the church. The first group, who turned out to be actors, were respectful and polite, although one of them complained that they hadn't been paid.
The other group were people in puffer jackets and balaclavas, including Clyde Zaube, who had organised the funeral and claimed to be Lauris Zaube's brother. They had hoods and dark glasses and looked sinister.
Clyde is not a Latvian name. Lauris Zaube's brother is called Maris.
Father McHardy, 49, (picture left), was about to begin the Requiem when the choirmaster took him aside and told him that the coffin was empty.
The priest approached Clyde Zaube, who wouldn't speak to him. It became clear he wasn't who he said he was. At this point, Father McHardy cancelled the funeral.
McHardy told DailyMail.co.uk (8 March) that he believed the man who organised the funeral was a convicted paedophile.
The funeral directors, T Cribb and Sons, had previously been provided with a death certificate, which was strangely from Russia. When they went to collect the body, they were told at the last minute that 'there is no body, we have ashes'.
To this day, Lauris Zaube's body has not been found. He had no personal or family connection to England, and it seems that the organisers of the fake funeral were simply using his name to put on a bizarre show.
Meanwhile, MailOnline has learned that the organiser of the pseudo-funeral is sex offender Jacky Jhaj, 38.
Last November, he staged a red carpet scene in London's West End, where 90 children and dozens more teenagers were dressed in school uniforms and asked to pretend to faint while Jhaj walked up and down in a red tuxedo as if he were a film star at a premiere outside the Odeon Luxe cinema in Leicester Square.
Jhaj was jailed in 2016 for preying on two 15-year-old schoolgirls, plying them with alcohol and taking them to parties before sexually assaulting them.
He is described as a self-aggrandising fantasist and conman who paid the undertaker more than £10,000 in advance to carry out the pseudo-funeral.
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