PETALING JAYA: A post-mortem in medico-legal cases where a death had occurred under suspicious, violent, unexplained or unnatural circumstances will be conducted upon orders from the police, according to the Health Ministry’s standard operating procedure for forensic medicine.
“If forensic post-mortem examination is required by the police for the purpose of their investigation, the Borang Permintaan Pemeriksaan Mayat, Polis 61 Pindaan 4/68, shall be issued by the investigating police officer.
“If forensic post-mortem examination is not required by the police to assist their investigation, the cause of death will be certified by the attending medical officer (MO) without prejudice,” it added.
For non-police cases, the attending medical officer must document the cause of death, while for medico-legal cases, the post-mortem should be carried out within 24 hours after the Polis 61 order for a post-mortem is made.
This post-mortem can only be performed in a government hospital by a fully registered medical officer.
For non-medico-legal cases that were brought in dead (BID), the police will have to issue burial permits.
As for cases that are considered as medico-legal, a burial permit will be issued after the post-mortem is conducted.
According to the Sabah Health Department’s website, a post- mortem is usually conducted for suicide cases; murder; sudden death; deaths induced by animals, machinery or accidents; death in custody; and bodies that were discovered with an unknown cause of death.
After conducting the post-mortem examination, the forensic pathologist will produce a post-mortem report based on their findings, histopathological examination and the laboratory analysis.
They may also be required to testify in court.
There have been questions on why a post-mortem was not conducted on Zara Qairina Mahathir’s remains before her body was released for burial.
Weeks after her death in July, the 13-year-old’s remains were exhumed and an eight hour post-mortem was conducted at Hospital Queen Elizabeth 1 in Kota Kinabalu on Sunday.
Meanwhile, senior forensic pathologist Datuk Seri Dr Bhupinder Singh, an associate professor at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland & University College Dublin Malaysia Campus, said the circumstances of Zara Qairina’s death had required a post-mortem.
“So once the death has occurred, even if it was at the hospital... the situation in which the body was found and the age of the individual is considered a very suspicious death,” he said.
He added that in medico-legal cases, the order for post-mortem comes through the police officers investigating the case and consent from the family is not required.
