The owners of a funeral home and two employees were arrested in Valencia, Spain, on charges of trafficking bodies and sold to medical universities for 1,200 euros, police said on Monday.
• Also read: Too “sexualized”? A Christ poster causes controversy in Spain
• Also read: Passport photocopies of 47 Transat customers stolen in Spain
These four men “forged documents to remove the bodies from hospitals and retirement homes, later selling them to universities for study purposes for 1,200 euros per body,” Spanish police said in a statement.
At least eleven bodies are said to have been sold illegally in the metropolis in the east of the country.
The four suspects also hired the universities to help them dispose of already examined remains by cremating them or distributing them in parts in the coffins of other people who are to be cremated.
In doing so, they “invoiced a university 5,040 euros for carrying out 11 cremations of the bodies examined, which were not listed on any of the invoices issued by the city's crematoriums,” the press release continues.
The investigation began in early 2023. Police then discovered that the two employees of this funeral home had forged documents in order 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. The sale to the university for study purposes had not received approval.
According to the police, the suspects were looking for “deceased people without family, preferably foreigners.”
In another case, they had received written permission from an old man who no longer had all his intellectual abilities to donate his body to science after his death.
That donation “was signed so the body could be sent to one medical school, but it ended up being sent to another” that “paid more,” police said.