SUDANESE medical officials have warned that more than 1,500 unidentified bodies piled up in several morgues could lead to an outbreak of disease, but there have been allegations that the government is covering up the causes of death.

Among the deceased are believed to be pro-democracy protesters, who activists say were killed by government forces.

They believe the failure to conduct proper autopsies is an attempt to conceal evidence of those killings.

Mahjoub Babaker, a forensic medicine and toxicology consultant for the country’s autopsy body, expressed concern over the proximity of one of the morgues to a market, saying that the bodies “could spread cholera among local residents.”

At a press conference on Monday, he and three other officials claimed that there was no need for independent autopsies, saying instead that there should be a mass burial of the bodies for public safety reasons.

Reports of the backlog of bodies awaiting autopsy first emerged in May and news videos released earlier this month showed piles of corpses kept in a building that appeared to have no refrigeration.

Last month, Sudan’s top public prosecutor authorised the mass burial of the bodies without an autopsy.

It came as the country faced an ongoing crackdown on protests following a military coup last October, which cut short Sudan’s democratic transition and led to the detention of hundreds of officials and activists.

Pro-democracy groups and families of missing protesters have said the failure to conduct proper autopsies aims to conceal evidence of the killing of hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators by the armed forces following the 2019 popular uprising that ousted veteran dictator Omar al-Bashir.

The Sudanese Doctors Committee held a protest outside the prosecutors’ headquarters on Sunday and called for all burials to be stopped until “a team of international, independent and reliable forensic medicine is retrieved, protecting the rights of the missing and their relatives, and seeking to reach the truth and achieve justice.”