EDITORIAL: Is a human being less than human when dead? Should it be treated as carcass of an animal? Should it be put on the rooftop of a hospital for the vultures and other scavengers to have a meal and bare its bones? The answer is a definite ‘No’, dictated as it is by religious and ethical standards observed by any society. But, that was not the case with Nishtar Hospital in Multan, a teaching hospital, where more than 200 decomposed human bodies were found on the rooftop of its mortuary building a week ago.
Till today, however, the whole truth about this macabre episode remains shrouded in mystery as the positions taken by the concerned authorities are contradictory, given the standard practice of attributing the blame to others.
Will we ever know who were these humans, wherefrom they came and how did they lost their lives? That may not happen, but no effort should be spared to discover the whole truth. That kind of pain is going to live in the heart of every conscientious human being.
No coffin, no funeral and no grave – what else can be more painful for those whose kith and kin have disappeared without leaving a trace. Accepted, the police hand over the bodies of those whose identity they fail to establish to the hospital to be kept in morgue. And in some cases these cadavers are dissected as demonstration for medical students in line with some established SOPs.
That too, however, is an outdated practice because for medical teaching purposes there are now state-of-the-art techniques as students can probe the human body using three-dimensional renderings in virtual reality, combined with physical replicas of the organs and real patient medical images such as ultrasound and CT scans.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case with Nishtar Hospital, and so is the question of identity of those who lay on its roof. And for that identity to be established there was also a discussion in the National Assembly on Monday. Initiating the discussion on a point of order, Kishwar Zehra, a Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Pakistan (MQM-P) lawmaker, asked for DNA tests, arguing that in case of unidentified bodies and decomposed bodies, DNA profile is only source to establish the identity of an individual, adding that the corpses could be of the people who went missing from Sindh and the erstwhile FATA region. “God forbid, our people could be [among] them,” she remarked.
Endorsing her demand, Abdul Qadir Mandokhel of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) said a number of MQM-P workers and supporters have disappeared and whose status as alive or dead cannot be confirmed as their condition and locations are unknown even after so many years.
Soon there was consensus on the issue and the house decided that there was the need for DNA tests. But no one should lose sight of the fact that if a body is kept in the decomposed state for a longer period of time it gets challenging for the experts to extract the DNA because it gets fragmented.
Moreover, it is plausibly argued that DNA evidence is a game-changer in criminal investigation but equally important is the fact that DNA is just a piece of a very complex puzzle; nothing more. We may therefore never succeed in identifying the dead bodies found on the roof of Multan’s tertiary-care hospital.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
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