A traffic that could not be more morbid.
The owners of a funeral home and two employees were arrested in Valencia, Spain, for trafficking in human corpses.
The bodies were sold for the sum of 1,200 euros to medical universities, the police announced on Monday.
The four men, aged 41 to 74, “falsified documents to remove the bodies from hospitals and retirement homes in order to later sell them to universities to be studied for 1,200 euros per corpse,” Spanish police said in a press release.
At least eleven corpses were allegedly sold illegally in this metropolis in the east of the country, reveals the investigation started in early 2023.
🚩Disarticulated a criminal record related to the sale of dead bodies in #Valencia
🚔Falsified #documentation to remove the hearts from #hospitals and reside in the sale of dead bodies subsequently to #universities for the study of 1,200💶 every dead body pic.twitter.com/NKCZ0L8wfd
— National Police (@policia) January 29, 2024
The four suspects also charged universities to help them dispose of remains already studied.
“They took advantage of the dissection and dismemberment of the bodies to place them in the coffins of other deceased people, proceeding to cremate several corpses in a single cremation, thus saving on their payment and at the same time charging them,” specifies The report.
Deaths “without family, preferably strangers”
They would have thus invoiced “5,040 euros to a university to carry out eleven cremations of bodies studied, which did not appear on any of the invoices issued by the city's crematoriums”, adds the press release.
Also read: United States: head of the morgue at Harvard Medical School accused of trafficking in human remains
The police then discovered that the two employees of this funeral home had falsified documents to sell a body stored in a hospital morgue to a university, instead of burying it.
This deceased was to be buried at his place of residence as part of a funeral financed by the town hall.
Its sale to the university for study purposes had not received anyone's consent.
According to the police, the suspects were looking for “deceased people without family, preferably foreigners or who had had precarious living conditions to commit the irregularities”.
In another case, three days before his death, they had obtained written authorization from an old man who no longer had all his intellectual capacities to donate his body to science after his death.
This donation “was signed for the body to be sent to a medical school, but it was ultimately sent to another” which “paid more,” police said.