Imagine a Saudi dying in a restaurant in Jeddah and his family learning about his death only three months later. As if that were not enough, imagine that the man was also carrying his ID card, a medical certificate detailing his health condition and a list of his relatives and their telephone numbers.
This is exactly what happened to Abdul Aziz Bayoumi from Makkah. The Jeddah police held his body in the morgue for three months before his family found out what had happened to him. Bayoumi’s family reported him missing as soon as they realized there was a problem and still had to wait three months before learning that he was dead.
Police officers in Jeddah insist that they contacted all the numbers found in the dead man’s notebook but received no response from any of them. Faced with such a situation, the police say they had no choice but to send the body to the morgue. They allege they requested information from the Civil Status Department in Makkah, which provided them with additional phone numbers. Again, so they say, they called the numbers and received no response.
The least that can be said for the police story is that no sane person would believe it. The claim that all the numbers the police claim they called produced no response flies in the face of all logic. Was the phone company part of a conspiracy to keep the dead man’s body in the morgue for three months? Why didn’t the police simply ask for help from the phone company which could have provided the addresses where the phone numbers were located? Would that have been so difficult and complicated? Why couldn’t the police use the resources of modern technology — which they have plenty of — to help them do their job? What if the problem was related to a serious crime or affected national security?
I don’t know if the family of the dead man has taken the matter up with the higher authorities, but I am confident the authorities will not hesitate to take appropriate action and admit the shortcomings on the part of the police. The least the police can do is offer an apology to the bereaved family.
