Africa-Press – Kenya. Fracas erupted at the Kisii Teaching and Referral Mortuary on Friday after a family protested the bad state of the body of their kin. The mourners had turned up to collect the body of Veronica Nyabonyi but found it littered with maggots.
There was no communication from the Kisii Teaching and Referral Hospital by press time. The hospital officials were said to be holed up in a meeting. Mourners said some parts of the deceased kin’s body appeared feasted by rats.
Henry Omambia, the family spokesperson, told journalists the poor storage facilities and uncaring morgue attendants were to blame for the mess. The deceased, Nyabonyi 84, was brought to Kisii Teaching and Referral Hospital for treatment on March 26, but succumbed days later and the body was transferred to the morgue for storage.
Omambia separately said they only managed to identify Veronica’s body by one foot. The attendants gave the intermittent power at the morgue as an alibi for the body decays.
The cold storage systems had been malfunctioning for weeks occasioning the decay of the bodies, one attendant told them. Several other bodies were said to be in bad shape owing to the state of the machines.
A miffed Omambia said it was unfortunate the morgue does not have an alternative power to keep the bodies safe from decomposing. Esther Kwamboka said she began growing suspicious on Wednesday when she was barred from accessing Veronica’s body view ahead of today’s planned burial.
” We came to pay bills and requested that I be allowed to see the body but one attendant kept me waiting. As I walked out my suspicions that something was amiss grew within me,” she told journalists.
Vincent, her son, told Governor Simba Arati and his health officers to own up to the deplorable state of the morgues across the county. The facility holds 100 bodies against the piling of 200 bodies according to an attendant.
” There are more than 200 bodies as we talk, an excess of 100 more,” he said. But as mourners protested one more woman said they also took a decomposed body for burial to Birongo in Nyaribari Chache on Tuesday. They had to seek the service of a mortician from another facility to clean the body of maggots before laying the kin to rest.
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