Three people have been detained by police in relation to the mummified remains. Three people have been detained by police in relation to the mummified remains.
In the southern Nigerian state of Edo, where 20 mummified bodies were found in a house thought to be a voodoo temple, authorities say they are still looking into what happened. However, this has led to a major disagreement.
A group in Benin City that describes itself as a civil society organization has criticized the police for deceiving the public in a statement.
The group said that the place where the mummified bodies were found was not a place where ritualists lived, but rather a recently built mortuary where bodies from an old institution were taken. A police medical team is presently investigating, according to police spokesman Chidi Nwabuzor to the BBC.
He said that the owner of the supposed shrine was on the run and that civil society groups did not have the right to decide if the mummified bodies in a house that was thought to be a shrine really belonged in a morgue.
It's unclear how long the victims had been inside the house, but according to the police, the building, which is roughly 3 miles (5 km) outside the city center, was searched after authorities received information about possible suspicious activity there.
In connection with the finding of the dead, which included 15 adult corpses, 3 female corpses, and 2 children, three suspects were detained on Wednesday.
Locals were outraged by the finding, several of whom expressed their horror in response to the revelation. Some are questioning how the remains might have been tucked away without the neighbors' seeing them.
