KARACHI: After three years of its success in tracing families of those buried as unidentified bodies in the city, the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) has expanded its project in finding relatives and loved ones of those unidentified people who are being admitted to hospitals in an unconscious condition, injured or critically ill, say officials.

The exercise is part of the CPLC project, called Shanakht [Identity], which is an effort to identify and trace the family of the unidentified.

It uses the biometric scanning technology — a system developed in 2015 primarily for identification of unclaimed bodies. It took almost three decades and the burial of more than 200,000 unclaimed corpses in the 30-acre Mowachh Goth graveyard of the Edhi Foundation to be developed before it was launched in last quarter of 2015.

Since then, the officials said, the CPLC traced and handed over 1,500 previously unclaimed and unidentified bodies to their families.

“Such bodies are being identified through the biometric scan technology by utilising the databank of the national database and registration authority (Nadra),” said CPLC’s Amir Hassan who has been looking after the Shanakht project. “We have established a special desk at the Edhi morgue to carry out the task in collaboration with the officials at the facility.”

He said that the cooperation extended by Nadra was exemplary.

“Since the project’s launch, we have been collecting relevant details of all unclaimed or unidentified bodies being brought here. After establishing and tracing all identity links, we inform the family of the dead person about his or her demise,” he said, adding: “So far in three years we have traced the families of 1,700 persons who died in different accidents and their bodies remained unidentified.”

He said the success of the project encouraged the CPLC as it had expanded it to those unidentified people who landed in different public hospitals following an accident or/and serious illness.

“In most of the cases, these patients suffer a memory loss or remain unconscious,” said Mr Hasan. “We followed the same procedure and technology which we do for the unclaimed bodies and make efforts to reach their families. It has recently been launched and results are promising, which give hopes for further improvement in the days to come.”

He referred to a recent incident when a young man was brought unconscious to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre and was admitted to the High Dependency Unit (HDU) of the facility.

“He was treated in the HDU for the last one month,” said Mr Hasan. “The CPLC Shanakht team took notice of this and approached hospital authorities where we took biometrics of the man for the identification. After establishing his identity we approached the family.

The injured man was identified as Ejaz and his father and elder brother finally took him to their home.”

Published in Dawn, August 27th, 2018