Salei buried in Minsk

11 Sep 2011 | Irina Goroshko

Fifteen thousand fans came to pay their last respects at HC Yunost-Minsk’s hockey arena, where the coffin with the remains of Ruslan Salei was placed on Saturday.

Ruslan Salei's family planned to spend two hours in Yunost, but there were so many people there that they spent more than three. NHL forwards Mikhail Grabovsky and Andrei Kostitsyn and many Belarusian players from KHL clubs also came for Salei's funeral.

An Anaheim jersey with number 24 was placed on Rusty's coffin. Salei spent 10 years (1996 to 2006) with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. Many Belarusian fans have expressed that they would like to see number 24 immortalized in Belarus hockey and name one of the country's hockey arenas, such as Chizhovka Arena, after him.

The Belarusian Ice Hockey Federation announced that it is going to hold an annual hockey tournament that will be named after Salei. BIHF chief Evgeny Vorsin said that Dinamo Minsk, the club champion of the top Belarusian league and two KHL or foreign clubs will participate in this tournament. This tournament will be played every year in early September.

Salei was buried in Minsk in Eastern (Vostochnoe) Cemetery, the place where a lot of famous Belarusians are buried.

The farewell and the funerals of forward Sergey Ostapchuk and physical trainer Nikolai Krivonosov will take place in Minsk on Sunday, September 11.