Johannesburg | Tuesday
HUNDREDS of unidentified and unclaimed corpses have piled up in mortuaries in and around Johannesburg and Pretoria, according to police who say they are forced to give the dead pauper’s burials.
“On average 35 to 45 unidentified bodies arrive in the morgues in Gauteng (Province) every day,” police representative Mary Martins-Engelbrecht said on Monday.
She said most of the bodies, like those in the mortuary in central Johannesburg’s crime-ridden suburb of Hillbrow, had been picked up with stabbing or bullet wounds.
According to the official opposition Democratic Alliance (DA), some 340 unidentified bodies were kept in the 13 mortuaries in Gauteng — which incorporates Johannesburg and the capital — as of the end of November.
The police said the situation had not reached crisis proportions but the mortuaries could soon run out of space.
According to Martins-Engelbrecht, police are obliged to arrange a pauper’s burial if 21 days pass without anyone claiming a body.
The police say several factors lead to corpses going unclaimed.
Many bodies are those of illegal immigrants from Mozambique, Malawi or Nigeria whose families do not know where they are. In other cases, families do not claim the bodies of their relatives because they cannot afford to pay for a funeral.
The DA last month drew attention to the problem of overcrowded mortuaries and asked to be given speedier authorisation for pauper’s burials.
According to the DA, disagreements between local departments over which should pay for the burials have complicated the problem. – AFP