KARACHI, Feb 16: On average, seven to eight bodies in the city are daily buried unidentified, thanks to a lack of coordination between the police and the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra). Both shift their responsibility onto the Edhi Foundation.

Experts say that if the police obtain fingerprints of an unclaimed body quickly enough after finding it in the city, they can ascertain the identity of the dead from the record on Nadra, which claims to have registered most of the country’s population.

However, what mostly happens is that when police find an unidentified body, they hand it over to the charity organisation whose staff keep it at their Sohrab Goth morgue for three days in the hope that a relative of the dead might turn up to claim the body.

After three days, the staff take the body’s photographs and bury it in the Edhi graveyard at Mawachh Goth off Hub River Road.

Hundreds of albums containing the photographs of those buried unidentified in the Edhi graveyard are kept at the charity organisation’s headquarters. Each photograph has a serial number on it.

The gravestones at the Edhi graveyard are also marked with the corresponding serial numbers.

Photographs were shown to all those who came looking for their missing relatives, said an official of the Edhi Foundation.

Ironically, such a large number of unidentified bodies continue to be buried in Karachi at a time when Nadra claims to have become an authority on identification, having issued 56 million Computerised National Identity Cards.

According to its website, the CNIC has become the sole identification document for all Pakistani adult citizens. With new registrants steadily growing, Nadra plans to register all 150 million citizens of Pakistan, says its website.

However, Nadra does not have any coordination with the police when it comes to the identification of unclaimed bodies. It lends a helping hand to law-enforcement agencies only in high-profile terrorism cases when instructed by the interior ministry to do so.

Experts say that no breach of secrecy is involved if Nadra allows police to access its database for investigation and identification.

“If officials of the passport office can access the database to confirm the authenticity of an identity card, why can’t the law-enforcement agencies have the same facility?” wondered an official.

“On average, seven to eight unclaimed bodies are handled by the Edhi Foundation daily in Karachi alone and the figure rises to around 30 to 32 for the rest of the country,” said Faisal Edhi, a senior official of the foundation.

Police carry out a routine legal formality under Section 174 of the criminal procedure code and hand over unidentified bodies for burial to the charity organisation.

The Edhi morgue at Sohrab Goth has a capacity for 300 bodies at a time and bears the cost of Rs500 for keeping a body for three days, said Anwar Kazmi, the administrator of the Edhi Foundation.

To absolve themselves of their part of responsibility in some cases, police often make a stereotype statement saying that fingerprints of a particular unidentified body have been sent to Nadra. But, as it happens, the body is buried unidentified by the Edhi Foundation.

Recently, Nadra reached an understanding with the Edhi Foundation to develop a mechanism for identifying unclaimed bodies.

According to the understanding, Nadra will train some staff of the foundation to enable them to collect fingerprints of unidentified bodies being brought to it.

Subsequently, the prints would be sent to Nadra and if the deceased had a CNIC, his, or her, identity could be established, Mr Kazmi said.

However, he admitted that the process would consume three days and the body would be buried by the time its identity was established. “But at least a sincere effort would be made for establishing the dead’s identity,” said Mr Kazmi.

Speaking to Dawn, Capital City Police Officer Waseem Ahmed conceded that police should do more and take these cases more seriously in an effort to establish identities of unclaimed bodies.

He also acknowledged that there was no coordination between police and Nadra when it came to the identification of unclaimed bodies.

However, he pointed out that police stations had recently been equipped with computers and as a first step the police were fully computerising Jamshed Town’s record.

“All police offices of Jamshed Town will be fully computerised by the end of March and, obviously, they will be linked to Nadra’s system,” the city police chief said.