A Nigerian medical student, Inya Egbe, was shocked and ran away from an autopsy lecture after seeing the corpse he was asked to autopsy.
Not only was this an overly sensitive reaction of a young man, but because the body his group was about to dissect was that of Devin, his friend of more than 7 years.
The now 26-year-old still vividly remembers what happened that day seven years ago at Nigeria’s University of Calabar, where he met his fellow students around three tables with a corpse on each, before screaming and running out.
“We used to meet together, but there were two bullet holes in the right side of his chest,” Enya Egbe said of his friend Devin, according to the BBC.
Egby stated that he sent a message to his friend’s family, who were going to different police stations in search of her son after he and three of his friends were arrested by security men, knowing that the family was eventually able to retrieve her son’s body.
Nigerian student shocked to see friend's body in anatomy class https://t.co/lQ6XkTkv5l
— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) August 2, 2021
The horrific story sheds light on what is happening to victims of police violence in the country, and according to research published in 2011 in the journal Clinical Anatomy, more than 90 percent of the bodies used in Nigerian medical schools are of criminals who have been shot.
In fact, this means that they were just suspects shot dead by the security forces, aged between 20 and 40, 95 percent of them male, and three in four of the lower socioeconomic class.
“So far, nothing has changed 10 years after its publication,” said Emeka Anyanu, professor of anatomy at the University of Nigeria and co-author of the study.
It is worth noting that there is a law in Nigeria that provides for unclaimed bodies in government mortuaries to be handed over to medical schools, and the state can also deal with the bodies of executed criminals, although the last execution was carried out in 2007.
Source: BBC, UK