Unclaimed dead bodies choke Police Hospital

14/09/09

Story: Musah Yahaya Jafaru
TWO HUNDRED out of the 400 unclaimed bodies which crowded the Police Hospital mortuary for more than four months were finally buried in mass graves at the Awudome Cemetery last Saturday.
The action became necessary after hospital authorities were prevented by the people of Bortianor from burying the unclaimed bodies at the Mile 11 cemetery in August.
The bodies comprised mainly accident victims, street dwellers and insane persons whose identities were difficult to establish.
The Medical Director of the hospital, DCOP Dr Godfried Asiamah, who supervised the burial, said the mortuary was overstreched by the number of unclaimed bodies.
He said the hospital was relieved that the unclaimed bodies had been buried, saying, “I am happy that we were able to bury them, because the continuous stay of the bodies was too stressful.”
The action was facilitated by the Accra Metropolitan Chief Executive, Mr Alfred Vanderpuije, who released the space at the Awudome Cemetery for the mass burial.
The space was released following a request by the hospital authorities to the assembly.
DCOP Dr Asiamah said the hospital had held on to the burial of the remaining 200 unclaimed bodies, with the hope of establishing their identities and getting their relatives to claim them.
DCOP Dr Godfried said the hospital had discontinued discussions with the people of Bortianor, since they had refused to allow the mass burial to take place at the Mile 11 Cemetery.
The lack of a site for the mass burial forced the authorities of the hospital to consider the option of cremating the 400 unclaimed bodies.
The authorities at the hospital, therefore, appealed to organisations and philanthropists to support the hospital authorities with some funds to enable them to carry out the cremation.
In an earlier interview, DCOP Dr Asiamah stressed that 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 of the cold room instead of the fridges.
This paper earlier reported that the Police Hospital mortuary in Accra faced an imminent crisis, if steps were not taken to bury about 400 bodies that had not been claimed or identified.
To avoid that situation, 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 the bodies.
He said 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 and 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, he said, whenever people died in the streets and their relatives did not come forward to claim the bodies, the police collected such bodies 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 fridges.
He explained that the fridges would break down if the bodies were not disposed of to make way for new bodies.