6 June 2021

The public prosecution sent the mother to jail for 15 days pending investigation over an accusation of killing her child. The prosecutor also ordered the exhumation and autopsy of the infant. The woman’s husband accused her of having the child from an affair and that she killed him for fear of scandal, according to case No. 2093 of 2021.

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Hossam was one of three children killed by their relatives, and were buried upon legal permits confirming that their deaths were natural, which allowed their killers to get away with it temporarily – and perhaps forever in other cases – and led to the fall of more victims, such as Habiba and her brother Mahmoud.

On Jan 6, 2017 the public prosecution ordered the exhumation and autopsy of Habiba Hamada Youssef, 27 days after her burial in Oish al-Hajar village in Mansoura, Dakahlia. The mother, Shaimaa Kamal, suspected that her child’s death was not natural, when she discovered that her death certificate read: “The cause of death is yet to be identified”. Therefore, she filed a report with the police station about the “unidentified cause of death”. However, before the prosecution took any procedure, Habiba’s elder brother Mahmoud had been murdered in the same room and on the same bed where Habiba died, which increased the grieving mother's suspicions.


Mahmoud, a student in the sixth grade, was Habiba's elder paternal half-brother. He was killed with a knife and his death pushed the prosecution to order the exhumation and autopsy of Habiba. The parents initially testified before the prosecutor that their child fell from a high place, and that no one was involved in her death, which helped the perpetrator get away temporarily. The burial permit was issued for Habiba based on the testimonies of her parents. In Hossam’s case, the health inspector falsely issued a burial permit that confirmed that his death was natural.

Hossam's burial permit relied on a medical prescription

On April 1, 2021 the mother laid down her lifeless infant, Hossam, in front of Dr. Tamer Abdul Muti, the health inspector in the Abu Kabir health unit, to examine him, saying that his condition deteriorated suddenly: “Last night, his body collapsed and his face turned blue, We rushed to the Abu Kabir hospital, and they told us that he died.”

Since he started to work in the Abu Kabir health unit in early 2017, Abdul Muti always required the bereaved families in such cases ¬¬¬¬¬– which he described as "sensitive" – to bring the official documents needed for the burial permit. He asked the mother and her sister: "Where is the father of the child? Where is your marriage certificate?”

The mother brought out a medical prescription out of the folds of her clothes, and told the doctor that her infant suffered from breathing problems and a severe biliary atresia. She said: "The doctor who examined [Hossam] wrote this prescription." The health inspector’s routine questions were followed by a visual inspection of the body of the infant who aged only 4 days. The inspector said Hossam died due to myocardial heart failure and biliary atresia, and issued the burial permit.

Over the past years the media reported several cases, in which health inspectors issued intentionally – except in a few ones – normal burial permits in criminal cases. We will shed light on some of these cases in the following lines:

أبرز القضايا التي تورط فيها مفتشو الصحة خلال السنوات الماضية




We conducted a survey of 100 random cases from 11 governorates that showed how families get burial permits for their deceased relatives, especially in villages and hamlets.



THE 80% OF SURVEYED CASES WHO RECEIVED BURIAL PERMITS WITHOUT HAVING THE BODY OF THE DECEASED EXAMINED BY A HEALTH INSPECTOR WERE AS FOLLOWS:


There are no accurate statistics of the unlawful burial permits that covered criminal offenses, and no competent investigating authority or research revealed official numbers or relative statistics about such cases. However, media outlets occasionally report such incidents.

The five-year-old Mohamed Makram was one of those cases which were reported in the media. The body of Makram was exhumed and examined five days after his burial. This incident happened two and a half years before Hossam’s case.

On March 10, 2019, the body of Makram was exhumed from the El-Mohammadiyah cemetery, and it was visually examined by Dr. Iman Bakhit, a forensic doctor in Zagazig, Sharqiya. The father was told that his son was raped and beaten to death, so he filed a report and accused two of his neighbors of sexually assaulting and killing his son in a citrus garden next to his house.

The father then testified that his son fell off his bike and passed away, so the police stopped investigations because there was no criminal suspicion in the incident, although the emergency department in the Minya Al-Qamh hospital issued two medical reports which confirmed that the child had bruises and scattered abrasions in the body. The father’s new testimony returned the case to square one.

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The narratives about Makram’s death reminded the father that the doctors at the hospital said then that his son was assaulted. Therefore, the father filed a report, asking the police to reopen the investigation into his son's death.

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Photocopies of the forensic doctor's reports regarding the exhumation of the bodies of (Hossam - Habiba – Mohamed).

Birth of Hossam.. A surprise for the father and an accusation for the mother

Hossam’s father was the first lead in the child’s murder mystery. Late March 2021, Ahmed Mohamed received a phone call while working in Saudi Arabia, in which his wife told him that she had given birth to her baby and named him Hossam as they agreed before his travel to Saudi Arabia.

The news raised the father’s suspicions, as he returned to Egypt on a vacation on 1 October 2020 and left again on 1 November 2020, and 10 days later his wife told him that she was pregnant in the second month. Three months later, she told him that she gave birth to their son.

The husband asked the mother of his three sons: "How come?" How did you give birth after only five months of pregnancy?" The wife asserted that her doctor said she gave birth after seven months of pregnancy. Then, the husband asked his brother to take the newborn to the doctor to inquire about the date of his birth.

In the next morning, the uncle visited Dr. Ahmed Abdel Salam who delivered Hossam, and asked him about the baby’s date of birth. The doctor said that the baby was born at 36 weeks gestation (9 months). The father learnt the news from his brother, which increased his suspicions. Meanwhile, the wife moved to her father's house.

The paternal grandmother accused the mother of having the child from an affair. Mahmoud, the eldest brother of Hossam’s mother, asked her husband to return from Saudi Arabia in order to conduct a genealogical DNA test on the baby to resolve the crisis rather than defaming the mother.

A day before the husband's return to Egypt, the infant died and was buried hours later as the mother got the burial permit from the Abu Kabir health unit. The husband asked his mother to file a report with the police station on the same day of Hossam’s death, questioning the lineage of the child.


The paternal grandmother of the deceased newborn – according to official documents – told the detective officer of in Abu Kabir that she suspected that Hossam’s death was “natural”, and demanded that the child be examined by the forensic doctor to find out the “real” cause of death, and whether the child was actually her grandson or not. The public prosecution ordered the exhumation and autopsy of the body of Hossam, and summoned the mother for testimony.

Solving the mystery of
the three crimes

Mohamed: The secret
behind the murder

The results of Mohamed Makram’s autopsy agreed with the two medical reports issued by the Minya Al-qamh hospital, but the victim's injuries have changed due to putrefaction. The report mentioned these injuries and abrasions in detail.

The autopsy report said that the injuries could be caused by collision with an object or more, and they probably occurred at the same time and date of the incident that was mentioned in the prosecution's report.

Habiba: Unclear cause of death

Habiba's body, which was exhumed on January 6, 2018, was in an advanced state of putrefaction, as it had been buried more than a month ago. Therefore, it was not possible to confirm if the fractures in the body were deadly and to know how they happened.

If there had been no mistake in Habiba's burial permit, and the details of the crime had been discovered, her brother Mahmoud would have been alive now, said Mohamed Hussein, Habiba's lawyer.

Hossam: 2 murder scenarios

"Hossam is actually the son of his mother, but he is not related to the husband, whose name is Ahmed Mohamed," read the child’s genealogical DNA test results, according to its report No. 579 of 2021.

Accordingly, the public prosecution ordered the arrest of Hossam's mother and her brother to hear their reply to the findings of the forensic report.



The exhumation of the bodies from the graves is carried out by a team of forensic medicine

Half of the cases did not die of natural causes

Dr. Mohamed Nabil, the former director of the Zeinhom Morgue, estimated that 50% of the cases that were exhumed and autopsied upon the order of the public prosecution, died of different causes than those recorded in their burial permits, noting that this percentage may vary from a doctor to another.



Major cases of body exhumation for criminal investigation

Click on the green dots to see extraction issues

The investigating authorities responded to requests of exhumation of the cases we mentioned; however, the forensic examination did not always reveal the real cause of death, as it happened in Habiba and Mohamed cases, so the investigating authorities played the most prominent role in solving those mysteries, and identified the perpetrators and their motives, unlike the case of Hossam which was resolved by the forensic examination.

Based on the results of forensic examination of Hossam’s body that confirmed the existence of a criminal suspicion in the death of the child, his mother was interrogated again by the public prosecution. The mother melted down and confessed that she killed her son, saying: "I strangled the child and killed him. I confess the crime to relieve my conscience.”

The birth and death of Hossam expose sexual affairs

The mother said she had affairs with more than one person during her husband's absence, which included consensual sexual relations and sometimes forcible sex offenses.

The genealogical DNA of Hossam matched with one of the people with whom the mother had an affair.

Mohamed and Habiba.. Murders for sex and nuisance

The two accused of killing Mohmed and Habiba confessed their crimes. In the case of Mohmed, the accused admitted that he lured the child, sexually assaulted him, and killed him for fear of exposing him.

In the case of Habiba and her brother, their uncle confessed the crime and said he killed Habiba because he was annoyed by her frequent crying, and killed her brother Mahmoud so as not to share the inheritance with him.

The exhumation of the body of the child Habiba in the graves of the village of Oish Al-Hajar

Pressure from the families of the victims may force the health inspector to issue a burial permit without examination

Customs and traditions prevent

A health inspector, who worked in Abu Tesht town, Qena for two years, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the doctors are usually pressured to issue inaccurate burial permits because the families refuse to expose the corpse, if it is of a woman, due to customs and traditions, or out of respect for the sanctity of death, when it is of a man or a child, especially in villages and hamlets of Upper Egypt, stressing that some families threaten the doctors and prevent them from doing their job.


* The health inspector talks about the pressures he is exposed to during his work



The criminals were arrested but the problem remained unsolved

The perpetrators of the three murders were handed down varying prison sentences: The mother who killed her son Hossam was sent to prison for seven years, while the uncle who killed his two nephews Habiba and Mahmoud was handed down a total 30-year prison sentence (15 years for each crime), and the neighbor who sexually assaulted Mohamed and killed him was sentenced 15 years in prison, because he was a juvenile.

However, the legal gaps that enabled those perpetrators to temporarily get away with their crimes still exist and may have enabled others to permanently get away. The Ministry of Health refused to comment on that.

* Hossam is a pseudonym for the child mentioned in case No. 2039 in 2021, in Abu Kabir.

* The voice of the health inspector was disguised upon his request to hide his identity.