[SOUTH AFRICA EVACUATES 74 SYNAGOGUE CORPSES]

IN a remarkable style, the government of the
Republic of South Africa, yesterday, took back
home 66 embalmed bodies of victims of the
September 12 Synagogue Church of All Nations,
SCOAN, building collapse.
The identified bodies, which had been under the
care of the Lagos State government at the
mortuaries of the Mainland Hospital, Yaba, and
Isolo General Hospital, Isolo, were part of the 80
victims from Nigeria and neighbouring countries
who lost their lives in the incident that is
undergoing a coroner’s inquest.
As early as 4am, an entourage of South African
government officials, medical and health workers,
military and plain clothes security personnel,
among others, began takingpossession of the
bodies at the Mainland Hospital morgue and Isolo
General Hospital, from a special medical team set
up by the Lagos government.
It was gathered that the high-powered entourage,
estimated to number over 100, touched down
shortly before midnight at the Murtala Muhammed
International Airport, Lagos in a South African
Airways passenger aircraft.
Soon thereafter, a South African Airways cargo
plane landed at the airport, bearing a
comprehensive shipment of incident response
equipment that included four state-of- the-art
refrigerated mass disaster, four pick-up vans,
waste disposal trucks, collapsible air-conditioned
tents, refuse bins, trolleys, body bags, generators,
Personnel Protective Equipment, PPEs, etc.
When Sunday Vanguard arrived the morgue of the
Mainland Hospital around 7am yesterday, it was a
beehive of activities as not less than 50 members
of the South African retrieval team were on ground.