Mortuary attendants steal the eyes of a dead 18-month-old child in Port Harcourt

Some staff of the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital, UPTH mortuary, have been arrested for allegedly removing the eyes of a dead 18-month-old twin named Chuma, who died of anaemia on August 3, 2018.

According to a report by TheSun, the father of the dead child who had gone back to pay the mortuary bill, two weeks later, discovered that the corpse they brought out for him, had been mutilated.

He said the UPTH mortuary attendants could not account for how, when or why the body parts got missing. He added that; “Even while the baby was still breathing, one of the nurses had approached me and asked me to pay N30,000 to have the baby buried somewhere. That got me annoyed. From that moment, they became nonchalant, claiming they were waiting for the blood test until the child died.”

According to the father of the dead child, he was prevented from taking pictures of the corpse. “I was so angry I wanted to fight the mortuary attendants. Eventually, I abandoned the corpse to them. That very day, I reported the case to the Rivers State Police Command; the next day, I got in touch with my lawyer and we wrote a petition to the Commissioner of Police on September 18. Till today, the question I am asking the mortuary attendants is, what happened to the two eyes of my baby?” Sunday stated.

The State’s Commissioner of Police, Ahmed Zaki, confirmed that “Sunday wrote a petition to me on September 18, and we immediately started the investigation.” Zaki affirmed that the Deputy Commissioner of Police in charge of SCID personally took charge of the case.
“We sent an invitation letter to the board of UPTH,” he said. It was gathered that UPTH snubbed the meeting scheduled for September 22. Four mortuary attendants have been arrested by the police for interrogation.