By Sarah Carr
CAIRO: Postmortem examinations performed on the body of Khaled Saeid contained “numerous significant deficiencies,” an expert assessment of the reports has found.
The assessment, published by the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of the Victims of Violence, says that the reports — which both found that 28-year-old Saied died as a result of asphyxiating on a plastic wrap of marijuana — did not comply with the minimum international standards for forensic autopsies.
Duarte Nuno Vieira and Jorgen L. Thomsen, chief forensic pathologists at the National Institute of Forensic Medicine of Portugal and the Institute of Forensic Medicine of Odense, respectively, based their opinion on reports describing the two autopsies performed on Saeid’s body on June 7 and 16, as well as on photographs taken during the autopsies.
Nuno Vieira and Thomsen describe the findings of the first autopsy report as “manifestly inadequate” because of the failure to “provide basic data such as the weight and individual characteristics of the various organs” and the fact that essential X-rays were not performed. Such X-rays, the forensic experts say, “would have been very relevant in this case to prove the absence of lesions.”
Saeid died after being apprehended by policemen Mahmoud Salah Mahmoud and Awad Suleiman on June 6, 2010 in an internet café in Cleopatra, Alexandria.
While eyewitnesses say that the two men violently beat Saeid and that he died at the scene, the interior ministry issued a statement immediately after his death, and before autopsy findings had been released saying that Saeid had previous criminal convictions, had evaded military service and that he swallowed the drug wrap when he saw Mahmoud and Suleiman approaching.
“The supposedly compelling diagnosis of death by asphyxia is not sufficiently supported by the data provided, and most of the aspects described, such as cyanosis [blueness of the skin] or congestion, are non-specific and inconclusive on their own,” Nuno Vieira and Thomsen say in the report.
The assessment is highly critical of the “disturbingly amateurish” photographs and, in particular, the apparent absence of a picture of the drug wrap in place in Saeid’s throat.
“There must certainly be a photograph of the [larynx] with the package in place, as it would be absolutely unacceptable if one had not been taken, a fact that reinforces the superficiality of the first autopsy and the unreliability of the conclusions reached.”
The experts are equally critical of the second report, which they say is equally flawed.
“Given that this is a second opinion that seeks to prove the facts described in the first and compensate for its manifest inadequacies, this is even more perplexing and significant,” the assessment states.
Claims made that lesions on Saeid’s body were caused when he fell from a stretcher while being taken to an ambulance are called into question by Nuno Vieira and Thomsen, who maintain that “the traumatic lesions are much more consistent with a beating during arrest than with an accidental fall” and that “even if the victim did fall during transportation, he was clearly also subjected to physical aggression.”
Nuno Vieira and Thomsen reserve their most scathing criticism for remarks made by El-Sebaey Ahmed El-Sebaey, one of three doctors who performed the second autopsy on Saeid’s exhumed body in response to the Nadeem Center’s earlier criticism of the autopsy reports.
El-Sebaey’s claim that the external examination performed on Saeid’s body was enough to diagnose the case “is so contrary to the most elementary international standards that no further remarks are required,” the two experts say.
“However, it does reveal that the procedures adopted in both autopsies would seem to be common practice in the country, which is very worrying,” they continue.
Furthermore, Nuno Vieira and Thomsen describe El-Sebaey’s statement that “it is not necessary to mention all manifestations and consequences of asphyxia as long as only some of those manifestations are enough to conclude the cause of death,” as “unbelievable” saying “it is not possible to reach a diagnosis of asphyxia based on only some of the signs — and sometimes not even when all of them are present.”
The experts conclude that the “deficiencies, inadequacies and incongruence in the reports of the two autopsies performed…clearly make it impossible to reach any firm conclusions about the circumstances surrounding his death and the cause of it.”
