A mild drama played out at the Federal High Court in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State wednesday, when the court clerk read out a case between the Federal Medical Centre, Ovom in Yenagoa and 121 unclaimed corpses.
Lawyers and those who were in the courtroom were still in shock when Justice Ajiya Nganjiwa sought to douse the jolted occupants of the courtroom.
“Now everybody is afraid because they have mentioned corpses,” the judge joked.
But the lawyer to FMC, Bayelsa, Mr. K. Clement, prayed the court to grant his 14-paragraph application requesting that the hospital should be given the go-ahead to give the unclaimed corpses a mass burial.
After listening to the argument backing the application, the judge concurred, stating that it was “time to allow the dead rest in peace”.
“The application is hereby granted for all the 121 abandoned corpses to be buried. All agencies and bodies involved must comply with this order,” he said.
The federal hospital had argued that the corpses would get a mass burial if the relatives of the deceased did not collect them.
THISDAY gathered that many of the bodies had been abandoned for over 10 years, thereby blocking space for fresh corpses.
Dr. Dennis Allagoa, Chief Medical Director (CMD) of FMC, Yenagoa, had earlier explained that the decision, among others, was taken to create space in the mortuary as fresh corpses were being brought in on a daily basis.
He also cited pollution of the health facility as reason for the decision to evacuate the cadavers in the next three weeks.