Across Indonesia cases are emerging of grieving families stealing back the bodies of dead coronavirus patients.
Grieving Indonesians are snatching back the bodies of family members who died of coronavirus, so the deceased can be buried in line with religious practice - despite the dead still potentially being contagious.
A fatwa issued by the Ulema Council, the country's top clerical body, states that many typical burial rites can be skipped if necessary because of the pandemic.But across the country, from the second largest city of Surabaya in East Java, Makassar in South Sulawesi, Bekasi in West Java to remote Maluku, more than half a dozen cases have emerged of families taking back the bodies of the dead - sometimes by force, from hospitals and ambulances - to ensure a traditional burial.
The most recent case, on June 26, involved hundreds of locals in Ambon City, Maluku stopping an ambulance that was taking a dead coronavirus patient to be buried. Without any protective clothing or equipment, the mob took the body to a cemetery to be buried. "The virus doesn't immediately die when the person dies. In the first four hours [after death] a body would be highly contagious, after eight hours the virus would still be alive. And when processing the dead, the body will be touched a lot which means the chance of it infecting those [people] are very high too. Dead bodies secrete liquids in the early stages, they need to be handled properly to prevent them from infecting people," he said.
Arman said that there were even rumours being spread by "provocateurs" that COVID-19 was a hoax designed to enrich doctors and nurses, and that each death guaranteed health workers a share of 300 million rupiah .
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