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Martin Wong

Health chief clears workers of blame and says police may have been at fault

The health chief has confirmed another  mix-up of bodies at Fu Shan Public Mortuary, but says workers there are not at fault this time.

It is the second mix-up of bodies at the mortuary this year and follows an incident this month where a mortuary worker misnumbered a body.

The case came to light yesterday after an investigation by the  Health Department  into an incident involving two men aged 50 and 59.

'We believed that the two bodies were mixed up before they were sent to the mortuary,'  the department's director, Lam  Ping-yan, said last night.

He said that police might have mixed up information about the bodies before sending them to the mortuary.

The department said the case was revealed when a family member went to identify the body of the 50-year-old man.

'They found that it was not him, although the information available on the paperwork and the body's wristband suggested otherwise,' a department spokesman said.

The spokesman said the body was actually that of a 59-year-old man who was also sent to the mortuary on Monday in the same van from Wong Tai Sin.

'We also found that workers at the mortuary strictly and completely followed every authorised procedure and double-checked the information offered by police during the whole process,' the spokesman said.

He added that the bodies were still being stored properly in the mortuary.

The department said it  gave the investigation report to police.

Police have refused to comment  because an investigation is continuing.

Aaron  Wan Chi-keung, convenor of a three-member committee set up to investigate the  body mix-up  in March, said  this case should not have happened.

'We have already suggested that police should write down the information of a  body immediately and tie a bracelet with correct information on it,' he said. 'No matter how many bodies  are sent to a mortuary from the same vehicle, there is no way they should be mixed up.'

Two weeks ago, human error by a worker at the  mortuary led to a body being wrongly numbered, with the reference number on documents differing from the one on the body.

The error was spotted when relatives went to collect the body, deputy director of health Leung  Ting-hung said.

It was later found that a staff member had wrongly copied the number. Dr Leung said the correct body was shown to relatives who later collected the body.

In March, the corpse of Wong  Fong-ho, 90, was taken from  the mortuary and cremated by the wrong family.

Rather than alert the families and the supervisor,  workers tried to cover it up by destroying the identification papers and tags of the other dead man, Wong  Yin-chau, 57, whose body was then placed in Wong Fong-ho's empty storage compartment.



Two more bodies mixed up at mortuary