Mortuary worker has ignored rules by sending five corpses to communal grave
A woman showed up at a mortuary to claim the body of her 65-year-old husband only to find it had been buried in a grave for unclaimed bodies, more than 20 days earlier than it should have been.
It was the fifth time in the past three months that the mortuary officer had sent a body for burial without waiting the prescribed 30 days.
The Department of Health, which manages the morgue, said the female mortuary officer was still working while an inquiry was conducted, and she might face disciplinary action.
Lo Wing-lok, vice-chairman of the League of Social Democrats and a former medical sector legislator, said it was unbelievable that the officer had done the same thing five times. He said it was 'disrespectful to the deceased'.
The man's body was found by police in his flat on September 1 and handed to the Victoria Public Mortuary in Kennedy Town, where a postmortem examination was conducted on September 4. Nothing suspicious was found, a spokesman for the department said.
After being told by the housing estate office and a social worker who had been following the case that he had no relatives, the mortuary officer handed the body to the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department on September 10. It was buried in the Communal Grave at Sandy Ridge Cemetery, near the Lo Wu border.
