Daily Times

MULTAN: The Punjab government Wednesday said that the abandoned bodies found at Nishtar Hospital Multan were not of missing persons and have been buried after legal formalities.

The clarification from the provincial government came after BNP-M leader Akhtar Mengal expressed concerns in the National Assembly the same day that the bodies could be of Balochistan’s missing persons.

On a point of order, Mengal sought the formation of a judicial committee to look into the hundreds of bodies discovered on the hospital’s rooftop, which would be presided over by a prominent judge of the superior judiciary.

The Baloch leader also requested that DNA testing be performed on those bodies because he thought some of them might be missing people.

Addressing a press conference at Multan Press Club, Punjab Chief Minister’s Advisor Tariq Zaman Gujjar said that Akhtar Mengal is respectable to them but his statement was surprising in which he suspected the abandoned bodies might be those of the missing persons.

“The Nishtar Medical Health University Vice Chancellor and Nishtar administration have a complete record of abandoned bodies and none of them is a missing person,” he said.

As per the instructions of the Punjab CM, Gujjar said, Nishtar Hospital management and the district administration handed over 58 abandoned bodies to the local police who buried them in cemeteries after offering funeral prayers.

Last week, news that unidentified, decomposing bodies had been discovered on the roof of Multan’s Nishtar Hospital’s mortuary horrified the whole country.

While the hospital administration laid the blame for the decomposing bodies on the medical center’s rooftop on police and rescue personnel, the province government began an investigation into the incident.