Jinja Regional Referral Hospital is stuck with the body of a day old baby whose mother was remanded to Kirinya prisons on Monday over murder related charges.
Twenty-five-year-old Betty Najja, a resident of Nalufenya A cell, in the Southern division in Jinja city is said to have delivered a baby boy on January 30th 2022 and hit his head with a brick and dumped the baby in a septic tank.
Najja told her neighbours that she had suffered a miscarriage. However, after failing to explain the whereabouts of the child’s remains, she confessed to having dumped the child in a septic tank.
Residents teamed up with police and retrieved the child and rushed him to Nalufenya children’s hospital for further management. However, health workers noted that the child had suffered from severe internal head injuries and they pronounced him dead about two hours after admission at the facility.
In her statement, Najja claimed that the father of the child was not willing to take responsibility and she lacked the capacity to raise him. “The father of this child was working as a casual labourer within Jinja town, but after learning that I was pregnant, he openly expressed his lack of interest in my child and I have never heard from him ever since,” she stated.
Arden Atwine, the Nalufenya A Defence Secretary, says that Najja was renting a one-roomed house in their area. “Najja was a very quiet lady who kept indoors, her neighbours don’t know much about her and the available records contained within the village register only indicate her name and age,” he says.
The postmortem conducted at the Jinja Regional Referral Hospital’s mortuary on Friday last week indicates that the toddler succumbed to a blood clot in the brain after suffering from a blunt force trauma on the head.
A pathologist who spoke on condition of anonymity, says that they held a meeting with Najja, who was then detained at Jinja central police station on the modalities of conducting the autopsy procedures in the presence of relatives, but she declined her participation.
“We are mandated to conduct autopsy procedures in the presence of relatives, but much as police authorities were willing to ferry her to the mortuary, Najja declined to oversee the process and further retaliated on how she lacked relatives to represent her, prompting us to conduct the procedure in the presence of police detectives,” he says.
On her part, the acting hospital director, Angela Namala says that there are no claimants for the toddler’s remains since Najja did not provide any links to her next of kin, mandated with ensuring the deceased’s decent sendoff.
Namala adds that they are waiting for the Jinja city officials’ response, concerning their proposal to allocate the space, where the deceased shall be temporarily buried in a decent place, where future claimants can easily retrieve his remains.
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