The international human rights watchdog, Amnesty International, has again carpeted Nigeria over shoddy investigation of violent deaths in the country. In its recent report entitled: “Nigeria: No Justice for the Dead,” Amnesty International observed that there are hundreds of killings by the Nigeria Police which were either never investigated or poorly investigated, giving rise to a situation where neither the dead nor their living relatives got justice at the end of the day.
The report also acknowledges that there is a medical practice in the country that makes doctors to sign death investigation reports of victims without bothering to either confirm what killed them or even seeing the corpses at all. Amnesty International which based most of its conclusions on a study of killings in Rivers State said that “basic techniques of crime scene protection and investigation are not applied and autopsies and inquests are either not carried out or are inadequate.
” The report decried the treatment of dead bodies at Braithwaite Memorial Specialist Hospital in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, where dead bodies are merely dumped on the floor or even corridors of the mortuaries. According to the report, “in many cases, the identity of the deceased is not known to the police and bodies are registered as ‘unknown’ while little effort is made by police to identify them.” Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for Africa, Lucy Freeman, said: “to have one of your friends or family members killed by the authorities causes terrible anguish, but never to find out the truth of what actually happened to them causes a particular agony for relatives of the victims. More»
