Tripoli, 25 March 2013:
Two of the corpses kept in the secret morgue in Shara Zawia Hospital since 1984 have been identified . . .[restrict]as those of Hadi Masoud Umrani from Zwara and Azhari Saleh Mohamed Al-Megrahi from Tripoli’s Bab Ben-Ghashir district. They were identified through the use of DNA samples.
The identification was announced yesterday, Sunday, by the Ministry of the Martyrs and the Missing.
According to the Ministry’s press office director, Hamad Al-Malki, the next of kin have already been informed by the Ministry’s Undersecretary, Mohamed Sidi Ibrahim, and a report of the procedures taken been forwarded to the Attorney General. The latter is expected to now give the permission for the bodies to be handed over for burial.
The secret mortuary was discovered on 30 August 2011, shortly after the liberation of Tripoli. The colonel in charge of security for the hospital told revolutionaries that it contained the bodies of those who had been hanged for their part in the audacious but abortive attack on Qaddafi’s Bab al Aziziya barracks in 1984, organised by the National Front for the Salvation of Libya.
Sixteen bodies were kept on ice in the morgue on Qaddafi’s orders for the next 27 years. In that time they became unrecognisable, dried out and blacked over time.
The Ministry has appealed to people to contact it and report their missing relatives and give DNA samples to facilitate the identification of the remaining nine unidentified bodies found in Shara Zawia Hospital. [/restrict]
