Medical student Enya Egbe, reportedly fled his anatomy class crying after being disturbed by the corpse he was asked to work on.
The body his group had been about to dissect was that of Divine, his friend of more than seven years.
“We used to go clubbing together,” he said. “There were two bullet holes on the right side of his chest.”
Mr Egbe sent a message to Divine’s family who, it turned out, had been going to different police stations in search of their relative after he and three friends were arrested by security agents on their way back from a night out.
The family eventually managed to reclaim his body.
According to Egbe’s classmate, Oyifo Ana “Most of the cadavers we used in school had bullets in them. I felt so bad when I realised that some of the people may not be real criminals,” Ms Ana said.
She added that early one morning she had seen a police van loaded with bloodied bodies at their medical school, which had a mortuary attached to it.
A recent BBC Report documents how Egbe’s shocking discovery highlighted both the lack of corpses available in Nigeria for medical students and what can happen to victims of police violence. See full report here
