Entering the dissection room as a medical student, the smell of formaldehyde fills the air and one is perplexed that these beautiful dead humans were once bubbling with life as we are currently. Darkly coloured, lying supine with a characteristic stiffness. The beauty of life. Some with a grin which to some people translates to Peace while living and also in the after-life while others the sadness justifying how unfair the world was to them.

Every year, a new set of cadavers adorn our dissection room with curiosity taking the better of us, we wanted to know where the bodies were gotten from? They are mostly criminals who had a shoot-out with the police and some unclaimed bodies, we were told.

Have we ever paused to wonder; these dead bodies that are always available to medical students year after year, where do they actually come from?
What if a significant number of them were due to police brutality?
What if they were not criminals as alleged?

At the University of Nigeria Enugu Campus, we were told of a medical student who saw her missing father among the cadavers to be dissected. Of course, they had to remove him from the dissection room and brought a new cadaver. According to the story, her father went to his office and never got back. He has been looked for all over the country but was never found only for her to find him lifeless on a dissection bench with a bullet hole.

An analysis of a 3yr data of the sources of cadavers used for dissection at the University of Ibadan medical school, 78.6% were suspected criminals who died during gun duels with law enforcement agents while 21.4% were accident victims and unclaimed bodies.

In all these, alleged gun duel is the biggest source of cadaver for medical school training.

What if substantial numbers of these alleged criminals that were killed were as a result of police brutality and not because they were engaging in gun duels with the law enforcement agency?

It is a fact that about a 70percent of cadavers used in medical school in Nigeria is due to the label “Armed Robbers”, ” Criminals” but on so many occasions, many people who were labeled armed robbers by members of the Police Force were actually innocent citizens who were going about their daily activities and got killed extrajudicially.

And the label, ” Armed Robber” was tied on them and who knows the next place these innocent citizens will find themselves?

Our Dissection Table Maybe.

An example of extrajudicial killings is the Apo 6 killings that the Judge sentenced two policemen to death after they shot 6 people at close range and accused them of being members of an armed robbery gang that had opened fire on the police officers when accosted at the checkpoint when it was clearly because the only female among the Apo 6 rejected the love advances of a policeman present at that checkpoint.
But they were labelled armed robbers to the public until the court proved otherwise after overwhelming pieces of evidence.

While we are not directly saying that all the cadavers that are used in medical training facilities and branded criminals are really innocent of their crime, Privi Test strongly believes a significant number of them are actually innocent. Our police culture of impunity where you can be killed and a crime dropped on your corpse or while still alive, you are tortured to confess to a crime you know nothing about and later killed has to end.

Do you think we have innocent people killed by the police and other security agencies and branded as criminals lying on the dissection table?

lalasticlala, mynd44

Source: https://blog.privitest.com/police-reform-are-our-cadavers-truly-criminals/

This extrajudicial killings dey happen everywhere in the world. Most people sabi abuse their power & authority.

Sundrus:
This extrajudicial killings dey happen everywhere in the world. Most people sabi abuse their power & authority.

Yes it happens everywhere in the world but most countries in the world do not use them as cadavers, unlike Nigeria where it makes up about 70percent

chieyine:

Yes it happens everywhere in the world but most countries in the world do not use them as cadavers, unlike Nigeria where it makes up about 70percent

Hmmm... Interesting.

Quite disheartening, people end up on your dissection table might be as a result of police brutality, we of those that end up in Rivers and shallow graves

Interestingly, I was wondering about the same thing just last night with a friend and former classmate. Mago Mago plenty for those cadavers wey bin dey for inside Anatomy/Histo dissection laboratory that year. They were not all armed robbers as we were told.

IamWonderful:
Quite disheartening, people end up on your dissection table might be as a result of police brutality, we of those that end up in Rivers and shallow graves

that is why a holistic reform of our security agencies are important