Our culture forbids keeping a child’s corpse — Mary Habila’s father fires back at minister’s autopsy demands
The family of Mary Habila, the young nurse who died under controversial circumstances at the guest house of the Minister of Works, David Umahi, in Ebonyi State, has fiercely opposed the plan to freeze burial plans for her late daughter.
Speaking in a highly emotional interview monitored via TrustTV News, the grieving father of the deceased, Mr Tanko Habila, lamented the psychological torture of having his daughter’s body held in a mortuary, declaring that it strictly violates their indigenous cultural traditions.
“In our culture, we do not keep the corpse of a child the way they are keeping my daughter’s body,” a distraught Tanko Habila stated, appealing to authorities to release her remains for an immediate and dignified burial.
A severe cultural and legal deadlock
Mr Habila’s public outburst exposes a massive standoff between the family’s deeply rooted traditions and the formal requirements of criminal justice and state power.
The family’s resistance comes less than 24 hours after Senator David Umahi told a press conference in Abuja that he had issued an explicit directive preventing the removal or burial of the corpse until an independent medical examiner confirms the exact cause of death.
While the minister claims the autopsy is required to legally exonerate his household and clear the air regarding wild allegations of foul play, the Habila family views the prolonged preservation of a young child’s remains as a cultural abomination and an unnecessary extension of their trauma.
Allegations of police and state intimidation
The case has assumed deep political undertones following statements from opposition figures and human rights groups questioning the handling of the scene.
Critics have raised alarms over the swift involvement of high-ranking security agencies, including requests to transfer the case diary from the local jurisdiction directly to the Inspector-General of Police in Abuja.
For Mr Tanko Habila and his extended relatives, the structural demands for phone call log tracking, cyber-investigations, and state-backed autopsies feel like heavy-handed measures that disregard a family’s grief.
“We are just asking to lay our daughter to rest in accordance with the laws of our ancestors,” a family representative noted, urging the federal government and the police leadership to balance the technicalities of the law with human empathy.
As the legal and cultural standoff intensifies, the body of the young nurse remains locked in a hospital mortuary, leaving the nation divided over where state investigative rights end and a family’s cultural sovereignty begins.
Read Also: Women’s group petitions Tinubu for probe into death of lady in Umahi’s mansion
