SCMP ; January 7, 2003
It was like a black farce in desperately poor taste. Body parts kept being unearthed at a landfill in Tseung Kwan O and, for three days, no one came forward to claim them.
Police suspicions that a serial killer might be at large ebbed when medical books and chemicals were found near the discarded limbs, suggesting they had come from a university or hospital. Still, no one owned up.
Finally, yesterday, the University of Hong Kong took the blame, explaining that the body parts got mixed up with construction waste when its medical faculty moved home.
At a press conference, the dean of the faculty rather inappropriately described what had happened as a 'mishap', and a 'stocktaking error' - adding to the sense that the severed torsos and thighs were being treated like lost luggage.
True, there are unlikely to be many grieving relatives bemoaning the indignities bestowed upon the corpses of their loved ones. The bodies taken by universities for medical research are often those of society's flotsam and jetsam - people who died with no one to give them a funeral or to care what happened to the body after death. However, the danger of this episode is that it threatens to send out a highly negative message to people who are considering donating organs after death, organs that are so desperately needed for life-saving transplants.
