“I can confirm that there are dead bodies at the mortuary and some of them have been with us for quite a while now. There are indications that some bodies have been with us for close to seven years and others have been here more than seven years,” he said.
In an exclusive interview with The Point yesterday, Sanneh acknowledged the fact that they have problems with identification of the dead bodies. “Sometimes dead bodies that come to this institution are often brought here by the police. It’s often that police would do their best in trying to identify these bodies. However, it happened that these bodies don’t have identification. Therefore, to bury them in our traditional way either by Muslim or Christian way would be very difficult.”
“To be able to bury somebody, you must do so in respect to their religion. Therefore, this could only happen when we get the identification of these bodies. This is one of the reasons they are being kept at the mortuary.”
“Once the identification is done, they will be given to their respective families for decent burial. However, at the moment we don’t have a choice than to keep them here. We don’t have that right as an institution to bury dead bodies that we don’t know how they come about,” he clarified.
“We are doing what we can do and that is to keep them here until those who brought them here do the necessary things. The last time we checked, the number of unidentified dead bodies we have at the mortuary is close to 50 bodies.”
These dead bodies, he went on, come at different times to the hospital. “These dead bodies also include female, male and young and old persons,” he said.
“We want to believe that some of these people were found dead. But there is investigation to indicate as to the cause of their death. I am not saying these are not accidental killing or death, but mysterious because we should be expecting to get a report from the police and the post-mortem carried out in the bodies to suggest as to what may be the cause of their deaths.”
“We don’t know whether these dead bodies are victims of the last regime or not, but what is clear is that some of them come during that time. We can’t also point a finger and say that they were murdered. We don’t have evidence for that. What we know is that they come here lifeless and our job is to keep them here at the mortuary and that is what we are doing.”
