John Travolta and his wife Kelly Preston arrived home in Florida with their son’s ashes today following an extraordinary cloak-and-dagger operation involving a decoy hearse and an empty coffin.

A black hearse carrying a simple wooden casket was dispatched from the Restview funeral home on Grand Bahama island to the local airport last night in what undertakers later claimed had been a ruse, possibly to divert waiting media.

Meanwhile the celebrity couple and their eight-year-old daughter Ella Bleu slipped away unseen for a flight home to Ocala, Florida, with an urn containing 16-year-old Jett’s ashes. It was unclear whether Travolta - an accomplished pilot whose home in Ocala, Florida, has its own runway and parking spots for aircraft including his own jumbo jet - had flown his family himself.

“Everything was in place, the cremation was completed and they decided to leave,” said Obie Wilchcombe, a Bahamas MP and friend of the Travolta family.

The cremation appeared to hve been dealt with swiftly, Jett’s body having undergone a post-mortem examination just hours earlier. It concluded that Jett died as the result of a seizure at the family’s luxury holiday home last Friday.

An unconfirmed report on the showbusiness website TMZ.com claimed yesterday that Jett still had a faint pulse when he was discovered lying in the toilet area of the bathroom, with the door closed. There was “a considerable amount of blood after the resuscitation efforts,” it claimed.

Travolta, 54 and Preston, 46, both devout followers of the Church of Scientology, are planning to hold a memorial service later this week, believing that he has not died but simply moved on to a new life.

Scientologists have no set rules or customs regarding how a person’s remains should be disposed of as it attaches little meaning to the physical form, believing that the body is simply a vehicle for one’s spiritual self - or “thetan” - which they consider immortal.

As a result they do not conduct funerals, only memorial services to fete the departed, acknowledge their accomplishments and wish them well in their future existence.

During the service, the minister emphasises that the person’s spiritual being has simply moved on into a new life and thanks them for the time they have spent with their loved ones. Bodies may be either cremated or interred.

“Simply put, you have lived before and will live again, lifetime after lifetime,” Tommy Davis, head of the Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Centre International in Los Angeles, told MSNBC.

As critics of Scientology questioned Travolta’s handling of his son’s medical condition, Mr Davis stressed that while the Church does not believe in drug treatments for psychological diagnoses, it does not oppose the use of drugs for medical conditions.

Jett was diagnosed at the age of two with Kawasaki Syndrome, a rare disease that inflames the blood vessels and can affect organs including the heart, causing him to have regular seizures. With adequate treatment, the mortality rate is less than 0.01 per cent. His parents had taken him off drug treatment after several years in consultation with neuro-surgeons, Travolta’s lawyers have stated.

Mr Wilchcombe said that he had seen the grieving actor immediately following Jett’s death.

He said: “He was crying, he was in a lot pain, a lot of hurting...it was the beginning of the worst day of his life and I saw it, I felt it.”

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