Dana Air Crash: Families Angry Over Decay Of Corpses

It was fresh confusion? at the Lekan Ogunsola? mortuary of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH)? yesterday as? many of? the corpses retrieved from the wreckage of the Dana plane crash? had? begun to? decompose.

?? This is even as the hospital authorities have released a total of six identifiable bodies so far.

Relatives of crash victims? blamed the government? and LASUTH authorities for the new twist, saying that the present challenge of decaying bodies could have been avoided if the bodies had been released to them on? identification? last week.

Another confusion the LASUTH authorities had to contend with was that victims’ families were mistaking the serial numbers given on identification ?of? corpses to be the tag number of the corpses.

Chief Medical Examiner, Consultant Pathologist and Forensic Medicine, Prof John Obafunwa lamented that the confusion caused by the victims’ families yesterday slowed down his work because he had to explain several times to victims’ families what he and his team were doing.

A victim’s relative narrated his ordeal like this: “We identified our sister’s body the first time, but they did not release it to us. We came back a second time to identify her, yet could not collect her body. Today, we are asked to identify her again.”