HOSPITAL officials in Indonesia have launched an appeal to find the family of a Scottish man whose body has lain in a mortuary for three months.
Scott Roddie, 52, died of natural causes while working on the island of Batam, South of Singapore, where he had had been living.
However, attempts to trace the expatriate's family have failed and now the hospital’s management has become worried about the condition of his body if it is kept too long in the morgue.
Mr Roddie, of Dundee, passed away while undergoing medical treatment at Awal Bros Hospital in March.
The hospital later sent his body to the main BPK Hospital, as no one had come forward to pick it up.
Rian Narulita, head of the BPK Hospital’s morgue, said that it was the local police’s intelligence division who had entrusted Mr Roddie’s body to her hospital, and that officers had been working to trace his family in the UK.
She said: “We keep calling on the police and Interpol to provide certainty on when the body will be picked up because it has been here too long.”
The medic added that, based on standard operating procedures, a dead body could be kept in cold storage for three months at maximum. The storage can last longer, up to six months, if the cold storage facility’s door is kept closed.
However, the cold-storage facility in which Mr Roddie’s body is being kept has been opened several times so there is no guarantee that its condition will not deteriorate within the next three months.
She added: “We don’t know what the problem is, neither his family nor the UK Embassy in Jakarta have yet picked up the body. We are really worried about the condition of the body.
“We want the body to be immediately picked up because BPK Hospital has only eight corpse cold-storage facilities. It is the only hospital in Riau Islands that has a corpse cold-storage facility.".
It is understood that the cost of storing Mr Roddie’s body has been around £1,000. The Scot had been working at a shipyard in Batam, and is believed to have been estranged from his family back home.
A source who wished to remain anonymous said the police were facing difficulties in tracing the whereabouts of Roddie’s family in the UK.
However, contact has been made with the UK Embassy, although they have been unable to provide assistance to resolve the problem.
Wawan Setiawan, a spokesman for BPK Hospital said: “We treated it differently because he’s a foreigner. According to our existing procedures, we bury a body if no family member picks it up within a month.
"But this is for Indonesians. The problem is, the UK Embassy has not yet given any helpful information for us to decide [what to do with the body]."
A spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that they had been informed of the death of a UK national abroad.
Batam is the name for both the island and its largest city, with both situated in the Riau Islands province of Indonesia.
It is the the eighth-largest city in the country, and a major industrial zone based around shipbuilding and electronics manufacture.
A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesperson said: “We have provided support to the family of a British man who died in Indonesia in February, including liaising with local authorities on their behalf.”
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