The Lagos State Government on Thursday commenced deoxyribo nucleic acid (DNA) testing on family members and victims of Sunday’s crash involving Dana Airline’s flight 992 in Lagos.
Already, samples have been taken from eight families for the test.
The Chief Medical Director of the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, Prof. Wale Oke, said the test was needed to justify that all scientific processes of identifying bodies had been concluded.
The DNA testing will also be conducted on the victims’ family members to establish the authenticity of their relationships.
Four to six weeks
The testing on all the bodies would take at least four to six weeks. This is bound to exacerbate the worries of the victims’ family members who had been eager to bury their dead.
All the 153 persons on board the plane, a Boeing MD-83, died while the figure for the on-the-ground victims’ crash in densely populated Iju-Ishaga suburb was yet to be determined.
Lagos said DNA testing must be conducted on all the 153 bodies already recovered from the crash site, including the 97 said to be burnt beyond recognition, in order to ensure that the right persons receive the bodies of the victims.
DNA is the fundamental building block for an individual’s entire genetic makeup. In identifying the real relations of the dead as in the present case, the testing team will take a sample from the body to test for its DNA and see if it is close to that of the family members.
The DNA testing will be conducted by the state pathological team headed by Prof. John Obafunwa.
A necessary process
Oke said, “We need to get the genetic mark of the bodies and we may face challenges with the unrecognisable bodies. Bodies who require this will take up to six weeks to be concluded because we are going to take tissues outside the country.
“The head of the team, Prof.Obafunwa, was busy in the autopsy room, so the other team members had to wait for him to supervise their analysis. To ensure accuracy, he would be supervising the DNA examination himself.”
For the test, the CMD said samples would only be taken from parents and in peculiar cases, siblings would be considered.
“We are asking the mother and father of the deceased, preferably, to come or the siblings so that we can take the specimens from them. In the absence of all these people, specimens would be taken from the children,” he explained.
He noted that only these relatives could present the genetic materials needed to match up with the DNA of the victims.
“Ideally, if we have the father and mother, we are likely to get a perfect match. The match becomes less perfect as you go down the terrain to take siblings and children,” he said.
Oke assured the relatives that the process of taking the samples was non-invasive and would not require blood donation.
Families’ complaints
Some relatives of the Dana plane crash victims who were at the Department of Pathology and Forensic at LASUTH on Thursday to participate in the DNA testing complained that the process was too slow.
One Mr. Gbenga Eguntola, who came to the hospital with the family of a victim of the crash, the late General Manager, Corporate Affairs of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Mr. Levi Ajuonuma, said there was the need to bring in more experts to participate in the forensic process in order to quicken it.
“We got here at 8am and it is now 1pm and just two families out of the 36 families that were scheduled for DNA examination have been called in for the examination. The process is just too slow and they may need to bring in more forensic experts to speed up this process. The pain of waiting to even identify is too severe, too prolonged,” Eguntola told our correspondent.
A man who said his father died in the crash burst into tears while speaking with our correspondent.
The man who spoke refused to give his name or the name of the dead father urged the state government to speed up the DNA identification process.
“I can’t speak right now, talk to my sister, all I know is that the government should speed up this process. We are willing to pay for it, if it will be faster,” he said.
The sister, who also refused to disclose her name, confirmed that eight families had been called in for the examination as of 4pm.
“They have just done eight families out of 36 and this is 4pm.We also have to wait for the result. This wait has compounded our frustrations,” she said.
A colleague of Miss Hope Okeke, who died in the plane crash, Mr. Mark Nwakudu, said the decision of the Lagos State Government to withhold the release of the remains of the crash victims would leave the wounds of the family members open.
Nwakudu however said there was little to be done, since the order came from the government and was backed by an existing coroner law.
He said, “We planned to give Okeke the befitting burial she deserved but all activities have to be suspended until the autopsy is carried out and the death certificate is issued, which will be useful in our subsequent actions.
“The longer the corpses remained unburied, the longer the loss remained an open wound for those who lost their loved ones.”
The deceased, he said, was a nurse at the SOS Children’s Village, Lagos before the incident.
Mr. Oluremi Arokoyu, husband of Olusola Aroyoku, a banker who died in the crash, said he believed in a formal process which would lead to proper identification of victims by their families.
‘‘I strongly believe in following due process in carrying out a suitable identification of victims of the air crash by their loved ones or family members,’’ he said.
Meanwhile, Dr. Edamisan Temiye of the Lagos University Teaching hospital, Idi-Araba, said that conducting DNA examination was compulsory because some family members feared to look closely at dead bodies and they might identify wrong bodies.
Temiye, a paediatric haematologist, said it was only DNA testing that could be used to determine conclusively the link between a dead victim and members of his or her family.
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