Deaths without dignity |
A MUST READ
Sherief Gaber
21st of August 2013
Mada Masr
▻http://www.madamasr.com/content/deaths-without-dignity
I found myself at Zeinhom again this week, the sadly familiar walk up the street now met with several large idling trucks, supposedly refrigerated, brought in to store the hundreds of bodies from the August 14 Rabea al-Adaweya massacre that the morgue had no room for. Each day since then more bodies had arrived. A couple of days ago it was at least 36 detainees killed by police as they were being transported to Abu Zaabal prison, likely killed by a tear gas grenade thrown into the transport van, suffocating in the claustrophobic metal box. As we walked up to the doors of the morgue, new reinforced ones made of heavy sheet metal, an argument was already in progress with those inside, who were refusing to allow lawyers, photographers, anyone in. Using my phone’s camera as a makeshift periscope to peer through a grate over the doors, I saw bodies strewn about in the hallway, in various stages of decomposition, some bearing large rough autopsy scars down their chests and abdomens.
A man came up to me, asked to see the few seconds of video I had shot: “I want to know if my brother is there, please, I’ll know him if I see him.” I couldn’t comprehend the possibility of recognition in these figures, their features so distended and warped by rot, not natural decay but the rot produced by a place so neglected and neglectful. He said his brother wasn’t in the video, which likely only bought him a few minutes of relief until he would be confronted by the inevitable moment.