Daily Times

LAHORE: City police have failed to identify more than 160 bodies recovered from different areas of the city during the first quarter of the current year.

As per the records, city police stations recover more than 450 dead bodies from different areas of the city annually and only two or three dead bodies are identified while the rest lot is buried without identification or tracing their families.

Police sources told Daily Times on Friday that despite heavily equipped with technology and latest equipment, city police shy away from listening to when informed about any dead body. “Some policemen even try to shift dead bodies to the limits of other police stations,” they said.

According to sources, it takes Rs 4,000 to 5,000 to identify an unclaimed dead body… shift it to the city morgue for an autopsy and later bury it in a graveyard, which is usually bear by the beat sub-inspector and assistant sub-inspector as government and the Police Department do not pay for unidentified dead bodies.

In such cases, they said, some welfare trusts provide free of cost services, including post-mortem and burial rites, for unidentified dead bodies.

Police, however, claim, that upon recovering a dead body, they make several announcements in local mosques and when no one come to own the dead body they get it bury as per the law.

Police officers from different police stations said that they took pictures of unidentified dead bodies… share it with their colleagues in other police stations to find out bio-data of the dead bodies.

It might be mentioned that out 40 out of 160 dead bodies recovered from different areas f the provincial capital in the first three months of the current year were killed.