Nairobi County is set to dispose of unclaimed bodies in the month of August as city public morgue struggles with congestion.
In a notice to the public, the county says some of the unclaimed bodies have been in the morgue since 2024.
The Nairobi Funeral Home previously known as City Mortuary is currently holding 381 bodies which is about thrice its capacity, Mama Lucy Kibaki hospital 59 bodies and Mbagathi Funeral home has 35.
“Pursuant to Public Health Act Cap 242 [Subsidiary; Public Health (Public mortuaries rules, 1991] (2), interested members of the public are asked to identify and collect the below named bodies within 7 days,”
Most of the corpses were marked as unknown after being recovered by police who found no identification clues to help them trace relatives.
Under current standard operating procedures developed by the National Coroner, mortuary officials are required to trace fingerprints from each unclaimed body via the National Registration Bureau.
In addition, autopsies must be performed to determine the cause of death, even for bodies not involved in criminal investigations.
Among the bodies lying in the City mortuary are those that were collected in Mwingi sometime in June.
The bodies of six men and one female were transported from Kitui County to Nairobi following the bizarre discovery even as detectives continue looking for leads.
Officials at the facility in Nairobi said the four bodies were not badly disintegrated while three were decomposed beyond recognition and hard to identify.
During the exhumation in Mwingi, it was observed that the bodies had also been cautiously folded at the arms and legs to fit into the small, shallow graves.
The pathologists who conducted autopsies on the bodies were unable to ascertain the cause of deaths on two bodies since they were totally decomposed.
Thus they collected DNA samples for further analysis in case relatives show up and want to find out if one of them is their person.
