Police Hospital to cremate dead bodies

05/09/09

Story: Musah Yahaya Jafaru

AUTHORITIES at the Police Hospital are considering cremating the 400 unclaimed bodies at the hospital’s morgue, following the refusal of the people of Bortianor to allow a mass burial of the bodies at the Mile 11 Cemetery.
The Medical Director of the hospital, DCOP Dr Godfried Asiamah, therefore, appealed to organisations and philanthropists to support the hospital authorities with some funds to enable them to carry out the cremation.
The hospital authorities were in the news early August when the people of Bortianor refused to allow them to bury the unclaimed bodies at the cemetery at Mile 11.
Meanwhile, Dr Asiamah said the authorities of the hospital had appealed to the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) to secure a land for them to bury bodies.
He said if the AMA failed to secure the land, the hospital authorities would not have any option but to cremate the bodies, since the continuous storage of the bodies could break down the fridges of the mortuary.
According to him, some of the bodies were being kept on the floor in the cold room instead of the fridges.
In an earlier interview, Dr Asiamah said 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 said the hospital took steps to bury all the unidentified bodies in mass graves but the effort fell through when the people of Bortianor refused.
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, he said whenever people died in the streets and their relatives did not come forward to claim the 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 the death.
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.
However, he said, on many occasions people did not come forward to identify and claim the bodies.
The Medical Director said the police were compelled under the circumstances to organise mass burials for the unclaimed bodies to decongest the mortuary.