Who are we burying?

The government could be forced to exhume the victims of the Nigerian church collapse after a family disputed the identity of the body given to them.

The family of 47-year-old Phumzile Mkhulisi, a mother of two, said their sister had a distinct gap between her front teeth but the body returned to them two weeks ago has none.

Adding to the doubts of the Benoni, Ekurhuleni, family is that the body has no broken bones. They say it also has no skin.

The government's attempts to get them to cremate their sister without opening the body bag, purportedly because of fears of the Ebola virus, has fuelled their suspicions still further.

"Our government thinks we are submissive, that we take everything as gospel truth," said Mkhulisi's brother, Lwandle Mkhulisi. "When we challenge the status quo we are labelled troublemakers. We are not going to back down on this.

"Phumzile was born with that distinctive gap [in her teeth]. It's in the pictures. It can be proved."

He said the family was demanding an explanation.

"How do you explain this body we have? That has no gap. Do we accept that and bury it? No."

Mkhulisi said his sister could be in any of the 84 graves around the country in which followers of TB Joshua who died in the building collapse had been buried

Of the 116 people who died in the collapse at the Synagogue Church of All Nations building in Lagos in September, 84 were from South Africa.

Mkhulisi said the government's approach had raised the concern of his family Two days before the bodies were due back in South Africa officials had visited the family and asked if Phumzile had had any distinctive marks on her body.

He said this pointed to the government being unsure of the identities of bodies.

The family was told not to open the body bag as the bodies had been infected with Ebola, but they had done so anyway.

"We received a completely skinned body without any broken bones. How can we be sure of her identity if the body has no skin?"

Lucille Blumberg of the Centre for Communicable Diseases referred The Times to a study conducted on monkeys by researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US.

Its results, published in February, show that after testing swabs and tissue samples from dead Ebola-infected monkeys, scientists determined the virus could stay alive for up to seven days in a dead victim. Only non-infectious viral genetic material could remain for up to 70 days.

Mkhulisi said as soon as the government had learnt of the family's suspicions, their private undertaker had received a call from a state official ordering that the body be cremated immediately, which they refused to allow.

They became even more suspicious when the death notice form that came with the death certificate did not bear his sister's thumb prints.

Their biggest concern was that government officials said they didn't know where the bodies had been kept in Nigeria, forcing the family to question whether DNA tests were, in fact, conducted and the bodies properly identified, he said.

"We were not the only family concerned. There were four others," Mkhulisi said.

In January the other families were invited to Nigeria, "but when they returned, we were the only ones left questioning the process".

"I pleaded with them not to bury the remains until we were sure, but they went ahead. I don't know what changed."

Mkhulisi said the government had resisted the family's desire to have DNA tests conducted on the body. It was only after he wrote to the Health Department insisting on DNA tests that they were given the go-ahead.

In granting permission, in an e-mail to Mkhulisi, the deputy director at the Department of Health, Dr Terence Carter, set out strict guidelines under which the tests can be conducted and stipulated that samples must be sent to one of three specified laboratories.

Mkhulisi said he was pleading with other families to come forward and speak about their concerns.

"If the DNA results come back negative [the body is not Phumzile], they will also be affected."

If the results were negative "we will have all the bodies dug up. If something is wrong then the doctor that conducted the tests must come clean. We have been told he acknowledged that there was no match for Phumzile."