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Dying alone: Over 500 bodies go unclaimed every year
Burial ground. One of the cemeteries in Kampala along Jinja road. Authorities say there is a growing number of unclaimed bodies in Kampala. FILE PHOTO
More than 500 bodies of unknown people were last year picked from Kampala Metropolitan area and buried in a secluded cemetery in Kira Municipality, Wakiso District.
Authorities say there is a growing number of unclaimed bodies in Kampala, and regrettably, not much is known about these people or how they ended up with no one to claim them so that they rest in peace with their loved ones.
Usually there is no name on their graves — it is just a mortuary number, corresponding to their file in the cemetery’s record system and a few details.
The cemetery owned by Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) is the final resting place for hundreds of bodies that go unclaimed each year. The unclaimed dead, according to authorities, came from all walks of life.
Statistics from the city mortuary shows that last year alone, hundreds of dead bodies of men, women and children were not claimed by their relatives and friends.
Sunday Monitor understands that out of the 3,449 bodies brought to the mortuary by the authorities (Police and KCCA), only 2,948 bodies were claimed by their relatives.
The city mortuary is usually the first stop centre for relatives searching for their missing persons but last year relatives of 501 persons did not show up to claim bodies of their relatives and friends.
The authorities buried them in the public cemetery in Bukasa, all unclaimed but not unmourned, they walked different paths in life, but in death are entrusted to the city’s care for their final disposition.
In January last year, 38 bodies of unknown people were buried by KCCA staff in Bukasa, and in February (43), March (53), April (40), May (47), June (43) and July had the lowest number of unclaimed bodies with only 29. In August there were 48 unclaimed bodies, September had 46, October (36), November had 43, and in December, 35 bodies were unclaimed from the city mortuary.
The Director of Police Medical Services, Dr Moses Byaruhanga, explained that most of these unidentified bodies are picked by police from Kampala Metropolitan Police area (Wakiso, Mukono, Mpigi and within the central business district.
Dr Byaruhanga told Sunday Monitor at the weekend that some of the unclaimed bodies were picked off streets after being found electrocuted, some were victims of hit and run accidents while others were picked from bus parks.
Dr Byaruhanga, who doubles as the police pathologist, said most of the unclaimed bodies die from ‘blunt force trauma’ as result of road accidents, domestic violence, gun shots or drowning. Blunt force trauma is an injury that occurs when an object hits or strikes a part of the body.
Dr Byaruhanga, who has been examining some of these unclaimed bodies for years, says: “Most of these unclaimed bodies are middle aged men between 20 and 50 years. Over the years, the number of unclaimed bodies has kept increasing.”
Victims of road accidents form the bulk of unidentified and unclaimed bodies received at the city mortuary because they are usually robbed of their possessions immediately after the accidents, an insidious social problem in the country.
Before anybody is buried, attendants in the mortuary record a police reference against which the body in question was brought to the facility, the place where it came from, the date when it was brought into the mortuary, date when examined and date when the body was buried.
The Acting Director of Public Health and Environment in KCCA, Dr Daniel Ayen Okello, says whenever they received an unidentified body, they extract tissue for DNA to ease identification in future.
Dr Okello further clarified that unidentified persons are individually buried in marked graves to ease identification.
“Some relatives get to know about the death of their relatives after two years while for others, it is the State that may pick interest. When a person wants to have their person exhumed they should be helped by the police from where the body came to get a court order to exhume the body,” Dr Okello explains.
According to officials at the city mortuary, bodies are photographed, laying emphasis on the clothes the deceased was wearing, faith, identifiable marks like scars and ornaments they were wearing.
“When someone comes to claim their body, we are guided by this information to know where the person was buried,” Dr Byaruhanga explained.
He added that for bodies which could have been buried for more than three months, they are presumed to have decomposed and in that case, the police authorities uses a DNA match to identify them before handing them to their relatives.
Dr Byaruhanga told Sunday Monitor that every day, the city mortuary handles an average of 25 bodies, yet the city mortuary has capacity to keep only 36 bodies.
“We usually keep bodies between four to five days and if the body is not picked during that time, it is buried until the relatives appear and it is exhumed,” Dr Byaruhanga explained.
He told Sunday Monitor that many of these unclaimed bodies were found with head injuries, broken limbs and damaged internal organs.
“Ninety percent of these accidents are caused by boda-boda,” he said.
