Yala Sub-County Hospital administrators have asked families with missing relatives to visit the hospital’s morgue to see if their loved ones are among the seven unidentified bodies lying there.
In the last two months, the bodies of six men and one woman have been recovered from the Yala River.
According to medical superintendent Bruno Okal, the bodies were collected from various spots along the river.
“We call upon members of the public to visit and establish whether their missing kin are among the bodies. Three of the bodies were retrieved from water while four were found along the banks, according to the police who brought them,” Dr Okal said.
“The hospital administration is making this call in order to ease the strain that is currently experienced in the facility. We can only handle a maximum of 16 bodies. Secondly, relatives of the deceased persons should give them a decent send-off,” he added.
Some of the seven bodies had begun to decompose, as had 32 others discovered in the same river in January.
“Our mortuary is relatively small. Bodies retrieved from water are often in bad shape and require specialised handling … our facility is strained beyond limit,” he added.
Thirteen of those retrieved in January were positively identified by relatives using DNA analysis and were then collected and buried.
The news of unclaimed bodies retrieved from the Yala River and piled up at the Yala hospital mortuary shocked the country at the time, with media reports implying that they were extrajudicial killings carried out by state security agencies.
Johansen Oduor, the government’s chief pathologist who led the postmortem examinations on the 32 bodies, said at the time that some of them were skeletal.
Others, he said, had “disfigured faces” and could not be identified “except through DNA sampling.”
