HYDERABAD: A dead body, that of a 35-year-old male, was found recently in Shamshabad. It was brought to Osmania General Hospital for post-mortem which confirmed that it was a “suspicious murder case.” None has claimed the body till date and it remains in a room at the mortuary even as police keep “investigating” .Like this, 350 unidentified and unclaimed dead bodies were brought to the Osmania General Hospital and 248 to the Gandhi General Hospital. In total, 598, all recovered in the last five months. If one takes an annual average, it comes to around six a day. What’s even more alarming is that 90 per cent of these are “suspicious murders.”Last year, as many as 1,641 dead bodies were found in and around the twin cities and brought to the mortuaries. In New Delhi, a couple of days back, reports about a 1,000 unclaimed dead bodies, lying in mortuaries, alarmed and forced Chief Minister Sheila Dixit to take up the issue with Union Home Minister P Chidambaram. In Hyderabad, though, none seems bothered.These statistics show the State capital in a poor light. According to an official at Osmania General Hospital mortuary, 50 per cent of the dead bodies are dumped by criminals in the peripheral areas. Of these victims, 25 per cent are usually women. “90 per cent are criminal cases and the rest are deaths by starvation or accidents,” he told City Express.He said the bodies would be preserved at the mortuaries for a few weeks and later, handed over to the GHMC for cremation. “In some special cases, we keep the dead bodies until they get decomposed,” he added. But who could be these unfortunate people? The police say most of the unclaimed bodies are of migrants from Orissa, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. A number of workers come from these States in search of work. “As the population has been increasing rapidly, it has become difficult for us to identify the dead bodies and the reasons for the murders,” said a police official.Dr P Harikrishna, head of the forensic department at Osmania General Hospital, said the number of unclaimed dead bodies is surely increasing. “As per norms, unclaimed dead bodies should be cremated within 72 hours but hundreds of bodies are preserved in the mortuaries as they all fall under the suspicious murders category. We cannot ask the GHMC to dispose of the bodies without police clearance,” he said.K Rajeswar Rao, founder of Satya Harischandra Foundation which keeps track of unclaimed bodies, however, alleged that some people at the Osmania mortuary are making money out of dead bodies. “Around 600 unclaimed/unidentified dead bodies were sold from the Osmania mortuary in the past two years. Illegal selling of unclaimed dead bodies to medical institutions has become a big business here,” he said.
Comments
0 comment