[CP: The Point Newspaper]
By Buba Gagigo
One Kin’e Jeng Sallah, a Gambian who supports the mortuary through donations from other people has urged the Government to remove the corpses being kept at the country’s mortuary since former president Yahya Jammeh’s time.
“I usually visit the mortuary to assess things that are lacking there, if I go they will prepare a list of what they need, and I will go back to my donors for help. One day, I went there and I was discussing with one of the elders who is working at the mortuary. I don’t want to mention names for security. During our discussion, he told me that they are having corpses in the mortuary since former president Jammeh’s era or the last five years and the corpses are still kept there. They have requested for the authorities to remove them, but still nothing is done,” she revealed.
Madam Jeng Sallah further revealed what she saw in the facility at the Edward Francis Small Teaching Hospital [EFSTH], after she requested to be taken inside to see the corpses for herself.
“To get first-hand information and to be sure, I asked him to show me the bodies. At the beginning, I took it as a simple thing but later, it affected me. When he took me inside where those corpses were, I had to take a step back and take a deep breath because of the bad odour inside. I went back inside, and then he showed me how the corpses were arranged and their nature. One of the bodies that I saw, I could not differentiate whether it’s human or an animal. I saw a box and I asked what was inside the box, he told me ‘it’s a human body and that body in the box is child’…
“The other corpses are elders, but the child is not given the maximum respect as an underage. The child is in a box with other bodies. Among those bodies, you cannot differentiate the men and women,” she continued.
Kin’e further challenged the concerned authorities to prove her wrong if they think she is being dishonest.
“Let the Government or hospital authorities prove me wrong, if they think what I am saying is not true. Let them take the journalists there and see whether I am lying or not. Unless they smuggled the bodies; but that is not possible because I am told the bodies are about 40 to 50.
“The container that people are passing everyday around the mortuary let them open it and see. Let the police come out and tell us. They are the ones having the files. The old man told me this never happened there. He said before that dead bodies spend only 3days,” she concluded.
The Gambian lady who supports the mortuary at The Gambia’s main referral hospital through donations from others made the revelation in a live video on Facebook on Sunday. She claimed that the issue of the child was one of the reasons her team and her recorded the video and challenged the government.
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