morgue

Assault and Battery, Angolan Style

6 de September de 2016 Rafael Marques de Morais

Angolan national police officers have again been accused of carrying out extra-judicial executions at a police station. On a single day, August 31, the bodies of three men taken to a hospital morgue in the capital, Luanda, all displayed the unmistakable signs of being badly beaten. Autopsies revealed all three had been severely beaten with blunt objects, causing cranial fractures and other internal injuries, which directly caused their death. Opposition Member of Parliament Mihaela Webba, from the UNITA party (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), told Maka Angola “the National Police are, in effect, carrying out the death penalty, with no respect for peoples’ lives.” One of the victims, 40-year-old José Padrão Loureiro, known as Zeca, was laid to rest on Sunday. His grieving widow, Margarida Maria Armando, says that at approximately 7.30pm on the evening of August 31st, two patrol cars pulled up outside her home. The […]

Tales from the Crypt: Angola’s Hidden Hospital Horrors

5 de May de 2016 Rafael Marques de Morais

Morgue Tax “Sick people don’t have to pay. Only the dead.” At face value, this remark from one of the administrators of the Regional Hospital in Cafunfo, in the province of Lunda Norte seems to make no sense. Then clarity emerges: the town does not have electricity. The living have to put up with no electricity. But the families of the recently deceased are forced to pay “for a day or two’s refrigeration in the morgue” or deal with the gruesome consequences of a decomposing corpse. Cecilia Matias was only sixteen when she died from yellow fever. Her Aunt, Madalena Matias revealed that that the grieving family had to find the equivalent of nearly four hundred dollars for Cecilia’s body to be preserved while they arranged her funeral. “We bought two {200 litre) barrels of diesel at the pump, at a cost of 64.000 kwanzas, to keep Cecilia’s body preserved […]