After a few days the foul odour coming from Apartment 6 became too strong to have been bad plumbing.

Margaret Vella, who lived next door, couldn’t take it any longer. 

The police officers who forced open the green apartment door, after Margaret had called them, were the first to lay eyes on him since he had died a few days earlier.

A quiet man in his 60s, Paul lived and died in that beige apartment on his own. 

Around 3,000 Maltese people died last year. Most of them were watched by the tear-filled eyes of friends and loved ones as they passed away in hospital beds. 

The coming of ‘their time’ was followed by newspaper announcements, emotional funeral services and sober burials – “no flowers by request”. 

But not Paul’s. He was one of around 26 people who died alone and unnoticed that year. 

Responsibility for these lonesome bodies, 218 in the past 10 years, passes on to the State, under what is known as the Paupers’ Burial Protocol – an odd piece of 1960s law still in force today. 

“When someone dies at home, and no known carer is available, the police are called in and they collect the body for processing,” a spokesman for the health authorities said. The official list of these deserted dead is a rather gruesome sight to behold. 

We make it a point to treat these people with dignity

In a plastic file, an elderly woman who died in a retirement home and whose family showed no interest in burying her, shares the page with a nameless baby boy. Although he died in August 2009, his small chilled body was kept in the mortuary coolers until June 2010 because he was “abandoned by mother”.

In fact, several people whose lives ended with a long wait in the morgue are named on the list only by the number assigned to their corpse.

‘Body 46’ spent two years in the Mater Dei mortuary, from July 3, 2008 to July 30, 2010.

‘Body 34’ and ‘Body 35’, both men, died in July 22, 2007 only to be buried together over a year later on August 1, 2008.

A member of the hospital’s senior management told The Sunday Times of Malta how back in 2016 they had to ask lawmakers to change the rules on how long the mortuary was required to hold “the unclaimed”, before they could be released for burial. “We had an issue of storage. There was a time when we were really filling up,” he said. 

And as Malta changes, so too does its deaths. The hospital officer said babies and foreigners were becoming increasingly common sights in the mortuary – a number of who were unclaimed and or just “unwanted”.

Between 2014 and 2015 the mortuary at Mater Dei Hospital processed nearly 80 unclaimed bodies. Photo: Chris Sant Fournier

Between 2014 and 2015 the mortuary had processed nearly 80 of these cadavers. 

If the deceased is a foreigner, the health authorities said, the embassy is contacted and the long process to try and track down the next of kin begins. In many cases the search ends unsuccessfully.  

As with many other municipal peculiarities, the government issues a tender to handle the burials these people receive when their bodies are finally released. 

“We make it a point to treat these people with dignity – after all they are people just like you and me. Just because no one will claim them doesn’t mean they don’t deserve respect,” the hospital officer said. 

“We try and find out what religion they followed, if any, and proceed with a respectful burial,” he added, before feeling the need to say the government did not use mass graves.   

And that is where this story ends, as with Paul’s, in a special lot at the Addolorata Cemetery where one-by-one these unnoticed deaths are sealed in a burial attended by none.