Police in Sicily have arrested a former gravedigger and are investigating 18 others accused of illegally removing bodies from tombs to make way for new corpses.
The former gravedigger’s assistant was also arrested on Monday in the investigation dating from 2023 for alleged corruption and bribery in Trapani, on the west coast of the Italian island.
Police said they banned three funeral parlours from operating in the city, whose cemetery has been plagued in recent years with delays and complaints from local people.
Police searched the home of a forensic pathologist who is alleged to have aided the gravedigger by falsely certifying the decomposition of corpses – thereby making room for new bodies to be interred in their place.
When the gravedigger could not count on the forensic pathologist, investigators said he made decisions “on extraordinary exhumation procedures”, in which municipal burial niches were cleared of bodies so they could be resold.
Police believe the ex-worker took valuables, such as gold jewellery, from the bodies of those to be buried.
Relatives of the deceased were allegedly forced to pay the gravedigger in cash for expedited burials. The fee was colloquially referred to as “the coffee for the gravedigger”, implying that in exchange for the favour, an extra sum had to be paid.
“People were forced to pay in cash for faster burials,” said the police. “During the course of the investigation, no fewer than 25 cases of illicit burials were documented.”
Police found that the municipal gravedigger hindered an outside company brought in to manage the services, instead directing three mortuaries with whom he conspired to carry out burials, exhumations and the transfers of remains, in exchange for a percentage of the profit.
Police are still investigating what became of the removed corpses.
Cemeteries and funeral parlours are often controlled by the mafia in areas of Italy where those criminal organisations are entrenched.
Two weeks ago, the former custodian of the cemetery of Tropea, in the southern Italian region of Calabria, was sentenced to five years in prison, with three years and six months handed to his son, for operating what reports called a “cemetery of horrors”.
The pair, 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 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 burned.
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 exacerbated the crisis.
In 2021, in Caltanissetta, Sicily, authorities drew up a lottery to bury bodies in the few graves left free.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
