UTJ MK Rabbi Moshe Gafni called for the immeidate firing or
suspension of Professor Yehuda Hiss, head of the L. Greenberg
Institute of Forensic Medicine at Abu Kabir, over the
retention of parts from autopsied soldiers' bodies. On Monday
it was revealed that a soldier's skull was on display in a
glass case, and most of his body was held in the Institute,
in violation of the law and of basic principles of human
decency. The family of the soldier was not aware of the
situation and had not approved it.
But MK Anat Maor, chairman of the Knesset Science and
Technology Committee, also called on Health Minister Nissim
Dahan to suspend Hiss immediately.
The ministry, which owns and supervises the institute, had
last week identified body tissue illegally stored there as
belonging to four soldiers whose bodies had been autopsied.
The soldiers' families had been informed by the Israel
Defense Forces that the parts, including skull fragments, had
been identified as belonging to their dear ones.
The story about the body tissues began last year, when
Attorney-General Elyakim Rubinstein ordered a criminal
investigation into alleged misdeeds over several years at the
Abu Kabir institute. Health Minister Nissim Dahan had asked
Rubinstein to state his position on findings released the
previous April by a ministry investigating committee.
Health Ministry Associate Director-General Yitzhak Berlovich,
who was put in direct control of the institute last spring,
suspended all of its research activities and obtained funds
to renovate the 70-year-old building, whose autopsy rooms and
refrigeration facilities were reportedly in terrible
condition.
A newspaper report published a year ago claimed that Abu
Kabir had been involved in "selling" body parts removed from
corpses without permission from their families to medical
research institutes for use by medical students. They wrote
that the organs were not returned, but replaced by
"broomsticks, cotton wool, garden hoses," and other objects
to fill out the bodies after autopsy. Removal of organs
without the family's written permission is a crime.
Attorney Nitzana Darshan-Leitner, who has already accused
Hiss twice of violating corpses in cases she represented,
also called on Rubinstein to suspend Hiss following the new
charges. In 1998, Darshan-Leitner sued the institute on
behalf of the family of Alisdair Sinclair, a Scotsman who
died under mysterious circumstances in the Ben-Gurion Airport
lockup.
Sinclair's parents discovered that their son's heart and
other organs were missing. The institute later sent the
parents a heart and other missing organs, but the family is
still not certain they belonged to their son, said Darshan-
Leitner.
In another case, Darshan-Leitner petitioned the High Court of
Justice on behalf of the family of Ze'ev Buzaglo, after they
learned that doctors had practiced on his body in Abu Kabir.
Darshan-Leitner has demanded that Hiss be put on trial for
the affair.
The IDF claimed yesterday that the soldiers' body parts were
kept without its knowledge or approval. They said that no one
at Abu Kabir had notified the army they were keeping body
parts of soldiers who had been killed in training
accidents.
