A criminal group dealing in dead bodies has been dismantled in the Spanish city of Valencia, Spanish police said on Monday. According to the authority, employees of a funeral company falsified documents in order to be able to take corpses from hospitals and nursing homes, and sold them to universities for scientific research for 1,200 euros (448,000 forints).
The group searched for deceased persons without relatives or with foreign citizenship so that no one could dispute the deal later, the police statement reads.
The investigation began at the beginning of last year,
after it became apparent to the authorities that a body had been illegally taken by the undertaker from one of the medical facilities.
The deceased man would have received a social funeral in his hometown, so it turned out that the mortuary registration and the documents submitted to the registry office were also falsified.
In another case, a man who died in a nursing home was found to have donated his body for scientific purposes just three days before his death, when he was no longer fully mentally capable due to severe cognitive impairment.
The police found out that the perpetrators also cheated with the cremations;
after the completion of the scientific investigations, for example, one university was billed more than 5,000 euros (1,870,000 forints) for the cremation of 11 bodies, except that they were not included in the list of city crematoriums.
It happened that the remains of several individuals were cremated in a common casket, while each was billed separately to the university.
The police detained two managers of the funeral company, who were prosecuted for fraud, and two other employees of the company are accused of document forgery.
MTI
Photo: Michael Kauer / Pixabay
