THE Guyana Police Force (GPF) yesterday responded to an article published in the day’s edition of the Kaieteur News titled “Police now selling the dead.”According to the police in a press release, part of this investigation requires that the post-mortem be done by a registered government pathologist.

The practice of the police has been that whenever an unnatural death occurs at a place other than at public hospitals with storage facilities for bodies, the police will have these bodies stored at a funeral parlour until the post-mortem is conducted. Thereafter, the body will be handed over to relatives for burial.

Whenever no relatives come forward to accept the body, the police will cause it to be disposed of at the expense of the State. Among the funeral parlours being used by the GPF is Lyken’s Funeral Parlour.

However, unlike the complaint made by Managing Director of Lyken’s Funeral Parlour, Dr Dawn Stewart, that she is now having problems with the police, that funeral parlour has been complaining a long time ago with the advent of competition in the industry, the release said.

The fact that she is complaining of non-payment since 2012 is evidence that the complaints started long before this sitting police commissioner. Again, unlike what is reported by Dr. Stewart, the unpaid monies (not consistent with her version) are still being processed by the government,the police explained yesterday in the press statement.

The GPF noted too that the standard procedure relating to the removal of human remains is for detectives to inform the Duty Officer in the Police Division whenever processing of the scene is completed. The Duty Officer will then call a parlour to pick up the body and store it.

Earlier this year, the Central Islamic Organisation of Guyana (CIOG) by way of a letter informed the commissioner of police (COP) that it is handling funerals of Muslims in Guyana and paying costs associated with those deaths, GPF said.

They also informed the GPF that they have a contractual agreement with the Memorial and Crematorium Gardens Funeral Parlour to handle bodies and funerals of Muslims.

The CIOG requested that the GPF facilitate the collection of bodies by the said Memorial and Crematorium Gardens Funeral Parlour from the scene.

The GPF found the request to be a reasonable one and as a result, the commissioner of police (COP) forwarded the letter to the Divisional Commanders with instructions to facilitate the request.
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No funeral parlour complains about this arrangement except the Lyken Funeral Parlour, which has been insisting that it has a contract with the GPF that gives them a monopoly to uplift and store bodies.

However, when asked by the GPF and other government authorities to produce a copy of the said contract, Dr. Stewart has so far failed to so do .

The GPF believes that Kaieteur News would have been able to publish a far more professional account of this matter had they contacted the funeral home that Dr. Stewart referred to, or any Muslim organisation in Guyana instead of behaving unprofessionally in the publication of the article referred to and that of “Dem boys seh” also in Kaieteur News of Sunday, October 25, 2015 captioned “Two big man touting dead people.”