The Director of the Bamenda Regional Hospital has made a public outcry for inhabitants of the region to identify and collect corpses of their love ones abandoned for close to a year now at the hospital mortuary which are at the state of decomposition.
Dr. Denis Nsame said autopsies carried out by the hospital pathologists indicate that 7 out of 8 corpses abandoned have gunshot wounds. The medic added that the corpses are in deplorable conditions. The mortuary has a capacity to store 200 corpses.
“All those eight corpses, seven of them have gunshot injuries, injuries from sharp objects. Criminality is on the high rate in our region now,” he said. The eight corpses were brought in the hospital between February 2020 and May 2021 by the Police, City Council, the army rescue elements and prison authorities.
“Before this crisis, the issue of corpses abandoned in the mortuary wasn’t this alarming. When I began working here, there were more than 16 abandoned corpses which were later on buried…” Nsame recalled.
Violence has been rife in the North West region like in the South West. For close to five years now, armed separatist fighters who want to divide the country and achieve the independence of the putative state of Ambazonia have been battling it hard with security and defense forces.
Many have been caught in crossfire between the two while others have been mistakenly on some occasions to be separatist. UN estimates indicates the conflict has led to the dead of over 3000 persons, displaced over 700 000 and made over 60 000 to flee to neighbouring Nigeria to live as refugees. Violence in the two regions have been deepening with armed separatist resorting to the use of improvised explosive devices to target security elements.
By Doh Bertrand Nua
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