KARACHI: A special medical board exhumed the bodies of four victims of the Keamari toxic emissions case, collected samples and dispatched them to a Karachi University (KU) facility for analysis, it emerged on Saturday.

Officials said that the process of exhumation was conducted at the Yusuf Shah Bukhari graveyard where the victims, along with over a dozen others, were buried last month following their mysterious death in Kaemari’s Ali Muhammad Goth.

“In the first phase today, we have collected samples from four dead bodies, all belonged to one family — Razia in her 30s, her 19-year-old married son Shoaib and her two young children, two-year-old Shahid and one-year-old Haleema,” Dr Summaiya Syed Tariq, the police surgeon and convener of the medical board, told Dawn.

More bodies would be exhumed (for sample collection to ascertain the cause of their death), she added.

According to her, the samples to be analysed at Karachi University’s Industrial, Analytical Centre, would take time for final findings.

It might be recalled that the health department had constituted a medical board a few days back for exhuming bodies of 18 people who died last month allegedly from inhaling toxic emissions in Keamari’s Ali Muhammad Goth.

The victims, most of them children, were also found to be infected with measles.

The board was formed in compliance with the order of a judicial magistrate who had allowed an application filed by the police for exhumation of the bodies so that their post-mortem examination could be carried out to ascertain the exact cause of their deaths.

According to a notification, the director general of Sindh health services has constituted the board to conduct post-mortem/exhumation of four deceased persons in a case (FIR33/2023) registered at the Moachko police station.

The six-member board is headed by Dow Medical College Principal Prof Saba Sohail. The members are: Prof Naseem Ahmed, head of the pathology department at the Dow University of Health Sciences (DUHS); Prof Zakiuddin, head of forensic medicine at the DUHS; a senior female medico-legal officer as well as the district health officer, Keamari.

Published in Dawn, February 19th, 2023