Hospital error: Bereaved family buries wrong body

Anger ploughed through grief at the VS Hospital on Friday afternoon when the family of Nasreen Bano Jamadar, 25 — who died of pregnancy-related complications on Thursday — realized that her body had gone missing.
Nasreen’s body had been handed over to the family of Mittal Jadhav, a 19-year-old who had been murdered. Mittal’s body had been stored in the cold box adjoining Nasreen’s in the morgue in the small hours of Friday. Nasreen’s family realized only by noon on Friday that something was amiss. By then Nasreen’s last rites had been completed by Mittal’s family and Nasreen’s body had been buried.
VS Hospital’s internal probe revealed that the administration had inadvertently handed over Nasreen’s body to Mittal’s family. Mittal had been murdered in broad daylight on Wednesday by her spurned lover days ahead of her wedding on May 26.
The authorities plunged into frenetic action to rectify matters. A team of Ahmedabad rural police was made to accompany Mittal’s family to Dholera to exhume the body. Till late evening, emotions ran high as both families awaited the closure by getting custody of the mortal remains of their daughters. While the exhumed body of Nasreen was brought back to hospital late in the night, Mittal’s family insisted that either a repeat postmortem be carried out or the PM report be explained to them so that they are sure they got the correct body this time around. The turmoil continued for both families till late night

Mohammad Umar Shaikh, Nasreen’s brother, told TOI that his family was distraught. “As if the untimely death of my sister was not enough, gross negligence of the hospital has robbed us of our grief as well.”
Shaikh said that Nasreen married Saiyad Aamir Jamadar of Shahpur in Yadgir district of Karnataka seven years ago. The couple had two children, aged five and three-and-ahalf years.
“She had come to Ahmedabad about a month ago. On Thursday, she got labour pains and was brought to VS Hospital after she developed complications,” Shaikh said. “Before she was treated, authorities declared her dead. Then they messed up.”
The mix-up dealt an equally brutal blow to Mittal’s family which is already reeling under the shock of her murder.
Mittal’s father Ramesh Jadav told TOI that his family went to VS Hopital with Bavla police to claim her body. The staff — allegedly a peon at the morgue — recorded the wrong number of the box and handed over the body of Nasreen to the family.
“We didn’t realize it was not Mittal as we were grieving. We thought that her features had altered due to swelling after her death,” said Jadhav, a mason.
The blunder saw mammoth crowds belonging to Nasreen’s family swell on the VS campus. With the majority of them fasting in Ramzan, they performed namaaz outside the post-mortem room.
They also broke their fast in the evening at the same spot.