In an anatomy class he saw his friend’s corpse

A student from Medicine in Nigeria skipped anatomy class after recognizing corpse he was asked to dissect: it was his best friend’s body.

UK network BBC has now recalled the story medical student Enya Egbe experienced seven years ago. The young man, then 20, was practicing anatomy at the University of Calabar in Nigeria, along with other students. There were three corpses to dissect, placed on three different tables. But at one point, Egbe screamed and ran away: he had recognized Divine, his best friend, as one of the corpses. The two of them had forged a friendship over the past seven years.

“We were going to dance together,” he told the BBC. “He had two bullet holes on the right side of his chest,” he recalls painfully. Oyifo Ana, another student in the class, followed Egbe out of the classroom and found him crying a few feet away. “Most of the corpses we used in school had bullets. I felt really bad when I realized that some people maybe not real criminals,” Ana added.

Egbe contacted Divine’s family, who had gone to various police stations in an attempt to locate the young man after he and three friends were arrested by security guards. Divine’s family were finally able to recover a body. The shocking discovery in the medical class marks the lack of bodies available in Nigeria for medical students and what can happen to victims of police violence.

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In Nigeria, a law in force delivers “unclaimed bodies” from government mortuaries to medical schools. The state can also seize the bodies of executed criminals, although the last execution in this African country was in 2007. More than 90% of the corpses used in Nigerian medical schools are “criminals shot dead”, according to the report. a 2011 study published in the medical journal Clinical Anatomy.

Most of the bodies used in Nigerian medical schools are those of “slaughtered criminals,” according to a book published in the medical journal Clinical Anatomy.

Divine’s family managed to get some of the officers involved in her murder fired. His friend ended up graduating a year after his classmates and now works in a hospital.