Forensic medicine scandals and the tragedies in the morgues; who seeks to “bury” the evidence?
AlTaghyeer: Investigation: Amal Muhammad Al-Hassan
In a humanitarian disaster that may be the first of its kind, corpses are piling up in mortuaries in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, in unprepared conditions, accompanied by power cuts, leaving the bodies decomposed and the stench of the dead, who were denied a dignified sendoff, became too much for those residing near hospitals.
The incident shook people to the point that a sit-in was organized to protest what was dubbed an absolute “lack of morals and the absence of the law.”
Conflicting Reports
The martyr “Wad Akar” and his friends had no idea of the importance of the pictures they took in front of the murals on April 3rd, the last time Wad Akar was seen alive.
Thin black stripes over a white t-shirt and a white plastic bracelet on his hand were among the identifying signs that helped Dr. Khaled Mohamed Khaled recognize Wad Aker’s body lying in academic mortuary.
His hair, dreaded like a Rastafarian, was shaved off. Dr. Aqil Al-Nur, who re-dissected his body, said he found Wad Aker’s shaved hair in his pockets.
Martyr Wad Akkar
“Whoever is able to kill him and throw him in a public place is an influential party,” Amal, the sister of the martyr Muhammad Ismail, known as Wad Aker, told AlTaghyeer.
Amal revealed that her brother received constant threats from regular agents, who used to come to the barbershop he owned to threaten him, sometimes in front of his customers, who testified that they often rode pick-up trucks without plates.
After matching the DNA test with his mother’s, it was confirmed that the body lying in the “container” a temporary refrigerator given by UNAMID to morgues and was used for the temporary storage of soldiers in Darfur in the mortuary courtyard among the rest of the decomposing bodies belonged to the martyr Wad Akar, according to What Amal said, quoting members of the resistance committees.
What is confusing is the absence of pictures of him in the mortuary directory, because any corpse that enters the morgue is often accompanied by a report from the prosecution, is linked to the name of a specific investigation, and there are pictures from the scene of the crime, and recent pictures of the deceased before his body had decomposed so that it is easier for his family to identify him.
“We don’t know who put it in the midst of the decomposing corpses” his sister said, referring to their skepticism and their demand for an investigation into the results of the first autopsy carried out by the academic mortuary director Ashwaq al-Taher, along with two other doctors.
“They said in their autopsy that they were unable to find out the cause of death, not only that, but they wrote that the body belonged to a male from South Sudan, aged between forty and fifty.”
AlTaghyeer contacted the Ashwaq al-Taher in order to take her statement regarding the accusations against levied her, but she refused to comment.
The family also demanded that the autopsy be done again, which was done in the presence of the martyr’s brother and uncle.
The second report confirmed that he had been murdered and that he had been tortured. The second report also confirmed that he died from a blow to the head with a sharp object.
Hidden Report
Wad Akar’s family’s demands the doctors’ committee be held accountable, which said it could not identify the cause of death.
The committee formed by former Attorney General Mubarak Mahmoud joined the investigation into the family’s conflicting reports, and wrote in its report the need to file criminal investigations against the medical team that issued the first report under Articles » 89, 96, 114, and 97”, which are articles related to the accountability for those who submit false official reports, conceal evidence, and assist in covering up.
However, this report turned out to be nonexistent. As for the committee that was formed for the purpose of investigating the accumulation of bodies in morgues, it found – according to an informed forensic source – a report recommending that the decision be returned to the forensic medicine and the formation of a new committee.
A judicial source confirmed to AlTaghyeer that a report under Article 130 – premeditated murder – is pending forensic reports, and revealed that no investigation was conducted with the rest of those associated with the incident; the police personnel who brought the body to the morgue and the detective mentioned in the report.
Wad Aker’s family – according to his sister – delegates the matter to lawyers from the region, and does not know anything about the Attorney General’s decision to form a new committee.
The family feels very helpless, and says it can only pray to God for justice from above, having lost hope in justice here on earth.
Where did the Report Go?
The report, which a member of the committee assigned with investigating the mortuary body pile up confirmed there was an informed forensic source – who preferred to withhold his name – who accused higher ups within the prosecution of providing protection for forensic doctors who submit incorrect medical reports.
One of the members of the investigation committee, which demanded that the authors of the first report be held accountable, confirmed to AlTaghyeer that there was no chance of not knowing the causes of death due to the spasticity of the martyr’s limbs, which confirms that he was tortured before he was killed.
Corpse “103”
Wad Aker’s incident was not the first of its kind concerning conflicting forensic reports of those deceased or forcibly disappeared.
There is also the incident of the martyr Bahaa El-Din Nouri, who was killed while under the Rapid Support Forces’ custody.
The first forensic report came reported that he had succumbed to bodily illness and died, before His family demanded a second report that confirmed he had died due to torture.
Despite Nouri’s incident not taking place in the academic morgue, another strange incident occurred there.
The story goes back to the arrival of the body of a guard from South Sudan, James Shoal, who died mysteriously and was brought to the mortuary, with a report under Article 51 procedures.
The Committee for the Missing had prevented his burial due to the existence of a criminal suspicion in the manner of his death, but in Ramadan of 2020, a specialized force that was guarding “23” bodies, including the body “103”, transported and buried the dead in special cemeteries in the East Nile region.
After the burial, another body was discovered bearing the same number.
This disrupted the autopsy and burial procedures assigned by the Public Prosecutor to some prosecutors in an attempt to solve the problem of overcrowding in mortuaries.
“As of writing this investigation, the body number 103 has not been exhumed and wedo not know whether the numbers are consistent.”
5-7 new bodies arrive at mortuaries daily, “buried” among the other bodies, and it is impossible to reach them.
Undignified
The situation of those known and persons unknown is the same inside the morgues in Khartoum state today, as the huge number of bodies it contains is more than ten times its capacity, which is at about “250” bodies.
The corpses are piled on top of each other from the ground to the ceiling of the mortuary, men and women, some cover their nakedness with some clothes and others are completely naked.
Some decomposing corpses have begun to stick to each other, and large rats were reported to feed on their remains, according to what was revealed by the director of the Bashayer Aqil Al-Nour Morgue, Siwar Al-Dahab.
The human waste leakage caused by the corpses piling up inside the mortuaries is blocking hospital sewers. The mortuary in Bashair Hospital is only 10 meters away from the operating room and 200 meters from the dialysis room, according to the morgue’s director Dr. Akil.
The corpses, which exceeded 3,000 and have been piling up since 2019, are piled up in “3” mortuaries in the state of Khartoum; the Omdurman Hospital Mortuary, the Academic Mortuary and the Bashair Mortuary, the last being unable to accommodate more than “250” bodies.
Whirlpool of Accusations
While researching and investigating who was responsible, AlTaghyeer met with two sides that pointed at each other, neither accepting to bear part of the responsibility.
The two sides are the Committee on Missing Persons and the Forensic Medicine Authority, and each side was full of foul-mouthed hostility for the other.
Although the former Director of the Forensic Medicine Authority, Hashem Muhammad Salih Faqiri, was a member of the Committee on Missing Persons prior to his appointment in January 2020 as director of the Authority, he places the burden of responsibility fully on the Committee.
While the committee accused him of not implementing its decisions and submitted a complaint to the medical council.
Rejected Solutions
On the 25th of this September, the work of the committee that was set up for the autopsy and burial of the bodies, which was supported by a number of international organizations, including the Red Cross, began with a thousand bags to preserve the bodies and many autopsy tools, disinfectants, and others.
It is scheduled that the work of the committee will continue for two consecutive months, beginning with the Bashayer and Omdurman morgues, provided that the academic mortuary awaits a decision on the criminal cases it faces, according to the committee’s secretariat.
However, Somaya Othman, the mother of the forcibly disappeared 24 year old Ismail Tijani, does not feel reassured by the Attorney General’s decision to autopsy and bury the bodies.
The mother of the young man who was last seen being chased by the Rapid Support Forces, days after the Khartoum massacre, specifically on June 7, 2019, describes the Public Prosecutor’s decision as an attempt to “bury evidence along with the missing.”
Emergency lawyers have joined the families of the missing, demanding the presence of international teams, in terms of their lack of confidence in the forensic medicine authority and forensic doctors of Sudan.
Protest marches went out in the capital, calling the burial of the bodies a burial of the “retribution right of the martyrs,” demanding foreign expertise be brought in to deal with this matter.
The Attorney General’s office is now under very complicated political pressure, which previously was the main reason for his predecessors’ discharge, with many describing the accumulating bodies as a political matter.
The danger in this matter lies in that it will not simply end with the piled-up bodies being eventually buried, but it will rather remain stuck in societal memory for a long time, driving a wedge between the people and forensic medicine professionals/institutions, which will now require a lot of work to change the image that is set to accompany them.
