No valid claims made to date for 4 unidentified coffins found at construction site behind KKH: LTA

No valid claims have been made for the four unidentified coffins unearthed at a construction site behind KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH), the Land Transport Authority (LTA) said on Dec. 18.

LTA shared the update on Dec. 18 in response to queries from Mothership.

Necessary arrangements to be made

Earlier on Dec. 3, LTA posted a Notice of Exhumation in the Classified section of The Straits Times about four unidentified coffins which were discovered at a construction site along Bukit Timah Road, behind KKH.

It informed next-of-kin or descendants to come forth with information or make a claim, and gave a 14-day notice.

LTA said then that if no claims are made in this period, it will proceed with necessary arrangements in accordance with the relevant regulations.

An infographic by funeral parlour Nirvana explained that a generic exhumation starts with a site survey where the grave site is inspected, marked and prepared.

This is done either by National Environment Agency staff or authorised private contractors.

Families may then choose an auspicious date for exhumation and to honour religious ceremonies.

The graves are then carefully exhumed and the remains retrieved. The remains are then cremated or reburied.

For Muslim exhumations, the grave will be dug to the original soil depth to retrieve the remains, according to Wareesan Management.

The remains will then be shrouded in white cloth and reinterred. If no remains are found, a token amount of grave soil will be collected for reinterment.

Construction site used to be Christian cemetery

The construction site where the coffins were found is part of the North-South Corridor development, where a tunnel is being built.

Heritage enthusiasts theorised that the coffins might have belonged to deceased who were interred at the old Bukit Timah Christian Cemetery, which operated between 1865 and 1909.

Burials possibly continued to take place there until 1938, before the graves were exhumed in 1971.

The area later became Kampung Java Park in 1973.

The park closed in 2018 to make way for the North-South Corridor development.

Kevin Tan, adjunct professor of law at National University of Singapore and editor of the 2011 book "Spaces of the Dead: A Case from the Living", commented that the discovery of the coffins was an "interesting but not altogether surprising find".

"Because exhumation was undertaken so many years after [Bukit Timah cemetery] was closed for burials, the precise locations of all the bodies buried could not be ascertained with great accuracy back in the late 1960s and early 1970s," Tan explained.

"To make matters worse, many of the descendants of those buried there — mostly Christians — were descendants of expatriates who might have returned to England or other parts of the British empire from which they came," Tan said.

Top image via Mothership, The Straits Times