Tanzania doctor describes bodies taken from morgue as fresh protests loom

After Western officials accused Tanzania of removing the bodies of those killed during election protests, a doctor has told AFP of hundreds of patients and corpses being taken from his hospital to secret locations, fuelling calls for more demonstrations on Tuesday.

The election on October 29 erupted into days of violent protests over claims President Samia Suluhu Hassan had rigged the polls and was behind a campaign of murders and abductions of her critics. She was declared the winner with 98 percent of the vote.

The opposition says more than 1,000 people were killed as security forces cracked down on the protests with an alleged "shoot-to-kill" policy. The government has not given a death toll.

Anger over the crackdown has led to calls for fresh protests on Tuesday, Tanzania's independence day. Police have banned any demonstrations.

The authorities have tried to prevent any images and reports of the violence from getting out, having cut the internet for five days during the unrest and threatening people who share them.

A senior doctor at one of the biggest hospitals in Dar es Salaam spoke to AFP's Nairobi bureau on condition of anonymity.

"We were told not to say anything," he said. "They would take our phones to inspect if we had taken any photos or videos."

During a shift on November 1, he said, more than 200 of his patients were "taken away while receiving treatment" by men who were "not uniformed" and arrived in "green trucks resembling military vehicles".

"I don't know how many died," he said.

"They even took dead bodies from the morgue. The morgue was at full capacity, with some bodies left lying on the floor."

A morgue attendant told him "more than 300 bodies" were removed.

It was not clear where they were taken, but there are persistent reports of mass graves being used to hide the scale of the killings.

'Mass graves'

United Nations rights experts last week "noted chilling reports on the disappearance of victims' bodies from morgues, and allegations that human remains are being incinerated or buried in unidentified mass graves.

"Family members who identified remains were reportedly forced to sign false statements about the cause of death to receive the bodies," they said in a statement.

A group of Western embassies issued a joint statement on Friday calling for Tanzanian authorities to "urgently release all the bodies of the dead to their families".

AFP verified a widely shared video from a morgue at another Dar es Salaam hospital, Mwananyamala Regional, showing dozens of bodies with bullet wounds filling the floor.

Photos of the hospital from 2014 helped confirm the location, and sheets on some bodies are clearly marked as belonging to the government-run Medical Stores Department.

The Ministry of Health has said the video is fake and "created by criminals with malicious intent to tarnish our country".

AFP found no evidence of digital manipulation in the video, and its findings were corroborated by investigative site Bellingcat.

Weeks later, people were "still coming to hospitals to demand their relatives' bodies but they are now being threatened with arrest if they do so", the doctor said.

Those families are now "hopeless" and "very angry", he added.

"They have said they'll protest on December 9th."

'Brutality'

The crackdown has not stopped, with hundreds arrested over the last month and charged with treason, which carries the death penalty.

"The brutality I saw pushed me to contemplate abandoning this work," the doctor said.

In a speech last week, President Hassan said the force used was not excessive and accused Westerners who criticised the crackdown of being "colonisers".

"Were we supposed to simply watch that mob of demonstrators who were prepared to overthrow the government until they succeeded?" she said.

One young protester, speaking to AFP in Nairobi on condition of anonymity, described the speech as "a declaration of war" and said they would be back on the streets on Tuesday.

"I am scared, mostly for my family, so many of my friends have been abducted," the protester said, but added: "If you are submissive, you die. If you fight you might die, but at least there is hope."