Rubble of the collapsed Synagogue church guest house
Chiemelie Ezeobi with agency report
Two weeks after it kicked off forensic examination of the 115 bodies recovered from the rubble of the Synagogue, Church for All Nations (SCOAN), THISDAY gathered that the post-mortem of all the corpses has been completed.
Meanwhile, the South African government has decried the indefinite time the entire process is taking, lamenting that they are at the mercy of the Nigerian government.
Government spokesperson, Phumla Williams, said in an interview with Sunday Times of South Africa that they wished they had a timeline for the return of the bodies.
Thus, she said, the bereaved families have an indefinite wait for the return of the bodies, which she claimed has continued to decompose.
She was quoted by of the Nigerians. The South African government has decided that it needed to have a frank discussion with the families about the state the bodies would be in when they were returned.
“We are appealing to them that they expect the worst. I don’t think they want to see their relative in the state that they are in. The majority of them - I don’t think that they are looking good.
“Although three or four of the bodies from South Africans killed were in a better state because they had been embalmed quickly. We hoped that the process of repatriation would move quickly after the post-mortems.
“However, this process had been frustrated by the fact that Nigerian officials had insisted on doing DNA testing themselves. They don’t have the technology.
“We had hoped at least to assist in the process since. Nevertheless, the government was still waiting to hear if the bodies had been transported to a service provider for the testing. We don’t know when they are going to finish.”
She had also said the government had also learned that “because of the state in which the bodies are in, the DNA testing is not going to be a quick process by any stage; we are ready to go and fetch the bodies.”
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