Burials ‘in between graves’ at Osu Cemetery

With an average of 120 burials per month, the Osu Cemetery appears stretched beyond its capacity, TV3 has gathered.

Rumours that dead bodies are exhumed and burned behind the Cemetery were quashed by the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), but it came to the fore that new graves are being dug in between old ones.

“We have never exhumed any body and burnt it, and we will never allow it,” said Dr Simpson Anim Boateng, the Director of Health at the Assembly.

“AMA will never allow such a thing to happen.”

But Dr Boateng admitted, however, that there is little space within the Cemetery.

“There is no space left, so we are burying in between graves,” he revealed to TV3’s Narkwor Kwabla.

“These are originally meant for lanes, but because we are constrained and we don’t have anywhere to bury, that’s why we are doing that.”

Dismissing rumours that bodies are being exhumed and burned within the cemetery’s yard, Samuel Leh, a caretaker at the Cemetery revealed that residents in the vicinity are spreading those rumours because they often see smoke from lorry tyres, which are burnt just behind the cemetery.

“It is not true,” he insisted.

He said the same residents dump the refuse including the tyres behind the cemetery at night.

He indicated that the AMA is considering hiring night watchmen to stop the dumping of garbage behind the Osu Cemetery.