Pathologists on Wednesday conducted 36 more postmortems on the bodies of victims whose remains were exhumed in shallow mass graves in Shakahola Forest on the third day of operation.
So far, the experts who include Homicide Detectives, DCI, Foresnsic Experts and Government Chemist Experts have managed to examine 76 remains since the exercise started on Monday.
In his daily brief on Wednesday, Chief Government Pathologist Johansen Oduor said they expect to conclude the exercise on Friday and give room for resumption of exhumation exercise
“The process is going on seamlessly concurrently with the process of taking DNA from relatives of missing persons,” Oduor said while giving the brief at the Malindi Sub County Hospital Mortuary.
Oduor said 22 families have so far issued DNA samples to aid in the identification of their missing loved ones.
He said of the 36 postmortems conducted on Wednesday, 15 were on the remains of children and 19 on adults.
He said that they were unable to ascertain whether one of the bodies was that of an adult or child.
“The Number of males were 17 and females were 19 many of them were severely decomposed such that 23 severely decomposed 11 were moderately decomposed but two were mild meaning that they were not badly decomposed,” Oduor said.
He said majority of the victims (23) died due to starvation while four died as a result of asphyxiation which means they were deprived of oxygen through strangulation or suffocation.
Oduor said they were unable to ascertain the cause of death for seven bodies because of the nature of their decomposition.
He said they found a child with head injury and an adult with a chronic disease that is kidney and heart disease.
