FMC Yenagoa to Carry Out Mass Burial for Unclaimed Corpses

The Management of the Federal Medical Centre (FMC), Yenagoa said on Monday that it planned to carry out mass burial for the unclaimed corpses in its mortuary.

Dr. Dennis Allagoa, the Chief Medical Director, stated this in Yenagoa in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).

He said that pathologists in the hospital were in the process of counting and sorting the corpses that had over stayed.

Allagoa said that many of the corpses had been abandoned for over 10 years.

He explained that the exercise was to create space for fresh corpses being brought to the mortuary daily and to avoid pollution of the environment and the health facilities of the hospital.

“We issued a 21-day public notice because we noticed that corpses have littered the entire mortuary and there is no space to take in new corpses.

As the decay goes on in the mortuary, the corpses have become a threat to human life because chemical and biochemical effects are ongoing.

So, we want to clean up the area so that people can enjoy the benefit of a good site and space to bring in their corpses.

A lot of them are corpses that were deposited by the security operatives. Most of them are just bones, legs and they are not actually full bodies.

They brought in people that died on the road and from the rivers.

People that died due to issues of militancy, they brought them in their mass and they kept them at the morgue,” Allagoa said.

Allagoa, however, stated that the mass burial would follow due process, adding that it would be transparent.

He added that relevant stakeholders, such as the police, officials of the ministry of the environment, the judiciary among others had been notified of the planned mass burial.