By Ismail Auwal
A medical student was shocked to have discovered the body of his lost friend in an Anatomy class at the University of Calabar, seven years after the former was declared missing by his family.
The student identified as Enya Egbe screamed and ran away after after realizing that one of the bodies brought for teaching them in a class was that of his missing friend named Divine.
In an interview with BBC, Enya recounted how they used to go clubbing with the deceased.
“There were two bullet holes on the right side of his chest,” said Enya.
Oyifo Ana – who was one of the many students that ran after Enya and found him weeping outside, said “Most of the cadavers we used in school had bullets in them. I felt so bad when I realised that some of the people may not be real criminals.”
Enya subsequently contacted Divine’s family and learnt that they had contacted three different police stations in search of him after he and three friends were arrested by security agents on the way home from a night out.
The family were eventually able to reclaim his body, but the case highlighted a wider issue in Nigeria of police brutality and a law whereby ‘unclaimed bodies’ in government mortuaries are handed to medical schools.
mortuaries obtain family consent and full historical records of bodies donated to schools.
