KISUMU, Kenya, Jan 27 — Chief Government Pathologist Johansen Oduor has announced the conclusion of seventeen autopsies on bodies recovered from Yala River.
Oduor spoke on Thursday at the end of the second day of scheduled postmortems on the bodies booked at the Yala Sub-County Hospital Mortuary.
“Some of the bodies are very decomposed while others are just bones,” he said while promising a detailed report once the exercise is complete.
Eight other bodies are set to be examined on Friday to establish the cause of death for twenty-five victims whose bodies were retrieved from Yala River on diverse dates within a period of four months.
The pathologist was accompanied by police spokesperson Bruno Shioso who said the families which had identified their loved ones had been taken through counseling.
“We have a counseling tent here at the facility to take through those families to overcome the trauma,” he said.
He said samples were taken from the families to aid the DNA process to match the bodies to the relatives.
“The hospital is documenting the bodies in a professional manner and collecting DNA samples to help with full identification,” he said.
Shiosho has called upon Kenyans not to speculate on what caused the deaths but allow detectives to conclude their investigations.
He noted that police will issue a comprehensive statement on the deaths once DNA tests are completed.
“I want to appeal to Kenyans further to come out and help us identify the bodies that still remain unclaimed,” he said.
The post mortem examination of the bodies has been running concurrently with the physical identification of bodies by family members.
A family from Busia County identified the body of their kin, who disappeared two years ago, at the Yala Sub County Hospital Mortuary on Wednesday.
Magdalene Akitui and her brother Maurice Atiyang said their father, Oteba Akituyi, was abducted in Busia town on February 7, 2020, at around 3.30pm and his whereabouts remained unknown since.
“A grey Subaru Forester stopped behind him and that is how we never saw him again until today when we recovered his body,” Atiyang recalled.
The siblings explained that a scar on their father’s knee helped them identify him when police called upon families who had their relatives missing to go identify the bodies at the morgue.
“My father looks exactly like me but it took me time to identify him from the pile of bodies in this morgue. That is when I requested to be allowed to view his full body and I spotted the mark on his knee,” Atiyang said.
The victim’s body was tied with ropes with indications of torture.
“It is evident that my father was tortured by his abductors. There are ropes all over his body. It pains that these people only thought of dumping my father in a river,” Atiyang said.
By Wednesday, the number of families that had identified their loved ones stood at three as police called for more families with missing persons to turn up and identify the bodies.
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