UK passport
Reuters

The Batam Authority Hospital in the island of Batam in Indonesia is seeking the family of British national Scott Roddie who died more than three months ago. They want the family to collect his body as it has limited morgue storage facilities.

The hospital is also concerned about the condition of the body as its morgue facilities are only equipped to store bodies for three months. The head of the hospital's morgue Rian Narulita told the Jakarta Post that Roddie, 52 was undergoing medical treatment at the Awal Bros Hospital when he died.

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The newspaper, which published a copy of Roddie's passport, said that Roddie was working for a shipyard company in Batam and is believed to be estranged from his family. He hails from Dundee.

"We keep calling on the police and Interpol to provide certainty [on when the body will be picked up] because it has been here too long," said Rian. She said based on standard operating procedures, the morgue can hold a deceased body in cold storage for a maximum of three months.

The storage facility in which Roddie's body is being kept is in constant use and is being opened several times and as such, there is no guarantee that the body will not deteriorate in the next three months. "We don't know what the problem is, neither his family nor the UK Embassy in Jakarta have yet picked up the body. We are really worried about the condition of the body," Rian said.

She also said that the hospital's morgue facility can only store eight corpses at any one time. "It is the only hospital in Riau Islands that has a corpse cold-storage facility," Rian added.

The spokesperson for the Batam Authority Hospital, Wawan Setiawan said:"We treated it differently because he's a foreigner. According to our procedures, we bury a body if no family member picks it up within a month. But this is for Indonesians. The problem is, the UK Embassy has not yet given any helpful information for us to decide [what to do with the body]," Wawan said.