MADINAH, 20 June 2007 — The family of Eid Hamad Salim Al-Arawi, a 55-year-old cab driver, has finally figured out what happened to him. He simply disappeared one day. For over a year, his relatives have been wondering if he were alive or dead.
Now they’ve discovered that their relative had indeed fallen ill and died at Madinah’s King Fahd Hospital. The man’s body had been lying in a refrigerator in an area morgue until this week when officials finally were able to track down the man’s relatives.
“The problem was due to the fact that an employee had misspelled the name of my uncle. Instead of ‘Hamad,’ he wrote ‘Ahmad’ and the body stayed in the morgue for a whole year,” the deceased’s nephew was quoted as saying by Al-Madinah newspaper yesterday.
The nephew, whose name was not published, said the family began looking for Al-Arawi the day he went missing. They went to the police and subsequently the police checked area hospitals, but to no avail.
“A year later we received a call from Col. Saleh Al-Iraqi who told us that there is a body at King Fahd Hospital which could be Al-Arawi’s,” the nephew said. “We were told that my uncle felt suddenly ill and was transferred to the hospital, but died two hours later.”
The nephew said the error had caused a great deal of stress to the family. He said that three of the deceased’s daughters were unable to marry because he was their legal guardian (mahram) and since he was listed as “missing” and not “dead” they couldn’t acquire their mahram’s permission to marry. As the sole breadwinner for the immediate family, Al-Arawi’s absence left them in poverty. According to the newspaper report, they are about to be evicted from their home for they have not been able to pay rent.
“What is surprising is that my uncle has his ID, his license, and an ATM card, and his name is clearly written on all of them,” said the nephew. “When we saw the body it was hard for us to identify him because the body was in such a bad condition.”
The family of the victim urges the need for a committee that would investigate the death of Al-Arawi and would look into the problem. They have declined to accept the body until an inquiry into the error is made.
“Unfortunately, the responsible people at the Ministry of Health do not know about our suffering. We have suffered a lot,” said Umm Badar, the widow of the deceased.
The stress related to this error is more poignant considering that Muslims believe in the importance of burying people quickly after they die, typically on the same day or, if the death occurs at night, the following day. Al-Arawi’s body still lingers at the morgue.
