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Crisis looms
at Police Hospital Mortuary as
unclaimed bodies pile up
By Masahudu Ankiilu Kunateh, Ghanadot
Accra, Aug 30, Ghanadot - Crisis
is looming at the Police Hospital Mortuary in Accra
as 400 unclaimed bodies wait to be cleared for burial by
families.
The
hospital authorities sounded the
alarm when the people of Bortianor, a suburb of Accra
refused to allow them to bury some unclaimed bodies at the
cemetery at Mile 11.
The Medical Director of the hospital, DCOP Dr Godfried
Asiamah, lamented that “the
unclaimed bodies, which had been at the mortuary for more
than three months comprised mainly accident victims, street
dwellers and insane persons whose identities were difficult
to establish.”
He told some journalists in Ghana that the continuous
storage of the bodies could break down the fridges of the
mortuary.
To avoid that situation, the hospital took steps to bury all
the unidentified bodies in mass graves but the effort fell
through when the people of Bortianor refused the bodies.
Dr Asiamah further added that a similar exercise to
decongest the mortuary was undertaken last April with the
burial of 125 unclaimed bodies at the Mile 11 Cemetery at
Bortianor.
Statistics at the hospital indicate a steady rise in the
number of unidentified bodies sent to the hospital's
mortuary.
In
2007 for instance, 278 unclaimed bodies were buried while
373 were buried in 2008.
DCOP Dr Asiamah attributed the trend to road accidents in
which those who died were brought to the hospital by the
police or volunteers on the scene.
Additionally, whenever people died in the streets and their
relatives did not come forward to claim their bodies, the
police collected and brought them to the hospital's
mortuary.
"Numerous people die in the streets. They are picked up by
the police and they end up in our mortuary," he stressed,
pointing out that the difficulty was always with people who
died in such circumstances without any identification tags
on them.
DCOP Dr Asiamah said the medical officers conducted
post-mortem, while the investigative team conducted
investigations into the circumstances leading to such
deaths.
Thereafter, he said, his outfit made announcements in the
media about the dead bodies for their relatives to come out
to identify and claim them.
Some do not.
Under such
circumstances, the Medical
Director said the police were compelled to organise mass
burials for the unclaimed bodies to decongest the mortuary
fridges.
He explained that the fridges would break down if
the bodies were not disposed of to
make way for new bodies.
"If we do not decongest the fridges, they will break down,
the bodies will then get rotten and release bad stench," he
explained.
DCOP Dr Asiamah said the hospital authorities liaised with
the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) to pick the bodies in
refuse trucks to the Mile 11 Cemetery.
According to him, his outfit used the internally generated
funds to pay for the transportation of the bodies, which
affected the financial standing of the hospital.
DCOP Dr Asiamah appealed to the public to report to the
police whenever their relatives got missing and to respond
to announcements for the identification of dead bodies and
also appealed to the public to always carry their identity
cards to facilitate identification during emergency
situation.
Ghanadot
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