Cemetery workers in Calabria ‘removed bodies’ to make way for new corpses

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Italy: police footage appears to show cemetery workers removing bodies – video

Italian police have arrested three cemetery workers in Calabria accused of illegally removing bodies from tombs to make way for new corpses, as the country struggles with a shortage of burial space.

According to military police investigators, the suspects allegedly demanded money from mourning relatives to get the deceased a place in the local cemetery in Tropea, a seaside resort town near Vibo Valentia.

The three men, caught in the act by hidden cameras set up by police in the cemetery, were charged with conspiracy, grave violation, desecration of a corpse, illicit disposal of special cemetery waste and embezzlement.

“The video images allowed us to document how these three men, without any scruples, extracted corpses from graves,” said a statement from the police. “Some of these bodies have been dead for many years, while others were not yet decomposed.”

Police began to investigate last year when word began to spread in the resort of illegal activity in the cemetery and the possibility of getting a space there for a fee. One resident went to police when after visiting the cemetery to see the grave of one of his relatives, he saw it had been replaced with another one.

According to investigators, the suspects almost always operated at night, during the hours when the cemetery was closed to the public. The coffins were smashed with a pickaxe, the corpses stripped, and jewels removed with saws and hammers. A video seen by the Guardian shows bodies being disposed of in black plastic bags and thrown into rubbish bins or even burned.

“The crimes were carried out with spine-chilling conduct and offending the piety of the dead,” Camillo Falvo, the Vibo Valentia chief prosecutor, told Ansa. “They disposed of the bodies mercilessly and ruthlessly.”

A lack of tombs and spaces for urns in cemeteries has become a serious emergency, especially in southern Italy, where the coffins of the dead sometimes lie piled up in warehouses for years. The Covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the crisis.

Relatives of recently deceased people were willing to pay large sums of money to bury loved ones, according to investigators.

“The suspects not only took advantage of the situation – a serious shortage of free places that has existed for a long time at the Tropea cemetery – but also … of numerous families, grieving for unburied loved ones,” police said.

In May 2018, police in Palermo arrested four people who, according to investigators, were selling graves they had illegally emptied.

In Caltanissetta in Sicily, authorities drew up a lottery to bury bodies in the few graves left free.