Police in Sicily have arrested a former gravedigger and are investigating 18 others accused of illegally eradicating our bodies from tombs to make means for brand spanking new corpses.
The previous gravedigger’s assistant was additionally arrested on Monday within the investigation courting from 2023 for alleged corruption and bribery in Trapani, on the west coast of the Italian island.
Police stated they banned three funeral parlours from working within the metropolis, whose cemetery has been plagued lately with delays and complaints from native folks.
Police searched the house of a forensic pathologist who’s alleged to have aided the gravedigger by falsely certifying the decomposition of corpses – thereby making room for brand spanking new our bodies to be interred of their place.
When the gravedigger couldn’t rely on the forensic pathologist, investigators stated he made selections “on extraordinary exhumation procedures”, during which municipal burial niches have been cleared of our bodies so that they might be resold.
Police consider the ex-worker took valuables, similar to gold jewelry, from the our bodies of these to be buried.
Relations of the deceased have been allegedly pressured to pay the gravedigger in money for expedited burials. The charge was colloquially known as “the espresso for the gravedigger”, implying that in change for the favour, an additional sum needed to be paid.
“Individuals have been pressured to pay in money for quicker burials,” stated the police. “In the course of the course of the investigation, no fewer than 25 circumstances of illicit burials have been documented.”
Police discovered that the municipal gravedigger hindered an out of doors firm introduced in to handle the companies, as a substitute directing three mortuaries with whom he conspired to hold out burials, exhumations and the transfers of stays, in change for a proportion of the revenue.
Police are nonetheless investigating what grew to become of the eliminated corpses.
Cemeteries and funeral parlours are sometimes managed by the mafia in areas of Italy the place these prison organisations are entrenched.
Two weeks in the past, the previous custodian of the cemetery of Tropea, within the southern Italian area of Calabria, was sentenced to 5 years in jail, with three years and 6 months handed to his son, for working what reviews referred to as a “cemetery of horrors”.
The pair, caught within the act by hidden cameras arrange by police within the cemetery, have been charged with conspiracy, grave violation, desecration of a corpse, illicit disposal of particular cemetery waste, and embezzlement.
The coffins have been smashed with a pickaxe, the corpses stripped, and jewels eliminated with saws and hammers. A video seen by the Guardian exhibits our bodies being disposed of in black plastic baggage and thrown into garbage bins or burned.
An absence of tombs and areas for urns in cemeteries has grow to be a severe emergency, particularly in southern Italy, the place the coffins of the useless generally lie piled up in warehouses for years. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the disaster.
In 2021, in Caltanissetta, Sicily, authorities drew up a lottery to bury our bodies within the few graves left free.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
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