Where is dad’s body, mortuary attedant queried

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 10:41:02 +0000

By MUYANI SHINJABALE

IT WAS a dark moment for a family of Kitwe when they discovered that the body of their deceased relative had been swapped for another, and was already buried.

The family had to exhume the body in order to confirm if the body that was buried by a different family was their own.

The deceased Barrington Mbambala died on Thursday Morning after an illness and was wrongly buried by members of a different family on Saturday.

Mildred Mbambala narrated that her father died on Thursday but that when they went to Kitwe Teaching Hospital Mortuary on Sunday to prepare the body for burial, they could not find it.

Ms.Mbambala  narrated that the mortuary attendant instead showed her a different body which looked like her father’s but was not him.

She said she was later taken to Ambassador Saint Ann where she still could not find the body either, and returned to Kitwe Teaching Hospital to search some more.

Ms. Mbambala noted that it was only after much pressure from the family members that the mortuary attendant decided to check in a dust bin where he threw identities of collected bodies and discovered that he had actually released the body of Mildred’s’ father to a different family who had already buried him on Saturday.

She said her family had been inconvenienced because they had to incur additional costs coming with a prolonged funeral and exhuming of the body.

Ms. Mbambala has appealed to Kitwe Teaching Hospital Management to be careful when handling such issues.

And Gershom Mbambala Son of the deceased said the development was a result of pure negligence of duty.

Efforts to reach Kitwe Teaching Hospital Management failed by press time.