The head of the Investigative Court number 1 of Valencia has prosecuted the four people he was investigating for allegedly plotting a plot from a funeral company to profit from corpses donated to science.
The magistrate considers that, from the procedures carried out, there is sufficient evidence of the commission of crimes of fraud and falsification of both public and private documents.
The instructor has issued two abbreviated procedure orders against the same people involved – two employees and two managers of the company – in the framework of the two cases that he was pursuing for these events, one for the alleged irregularities detected in relation to a corpse and another for those related to the bodies of seven other deceased.
In the first of these procedures, there are indications that the investigators conspired to falsify a document that erroneously stated that a deceased French citizen, whose body two of them had collected in December 2002 from the mortuary of the La Fe Hospital in València, and later taken to the CEU Valencia University, he had donated his body to science.
Likewise, as stated in the judicial order dated September 22, another document contained a false name to hide the real identity of the employee – one of those investigated – of the funeral home who had come to collect the mortal remains.
This documentation was delivered to both the Hospital La Fe and the Civil Registry of Valencia “with the intention of achieving a subsequent economic benefit from the management of funeral services,” adds the magistrate, since the company prepared an invoice for 1,331 euros in January 2023. which, however, was annulled in May of that same year.
The second of the cases filed by the same court affected the procedures carried out by the same funeral home with respect to the bodies of seven other people who died between October 2020 and December 2022.
In this case, the judge understands that there are “serious doubts” about “the reality of the donation documents” of the bodies to science and indications that they were fraudulently cremated, since several of them were supposedly introduced in a same coffin even though they were later billed separately.
In fact, there are nine invoices in the case for cremation of corpses for amounts ranging between 1,331 and 1,784 euros sent to a private university between January 2018 and 2023 without stating that “it was carried out in any crematorium in Valencia, being the mortal remains cremated along with other different ones,” points out the instructor.
There are also two other invoices issued in 2021 to the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Valencia for the funeral procedures of two other cases in which cremation is not recorded either.
“In this plot of unjust enrichment at the expense of the CEU University and the Faculty of Medicine of Valencia, in a somewhat painful way, as it deals with activities involving corpses” -continues the judge in his resolution-, which despite having the consideration Of “object” in law, it cannot be forgotten that they are “human remains, of people who have died, to which a certain respect and consideration must be given.”
Along these lines, the magistrate concludes that the “plot hatched” by the four investigated allegedly simulated, invented or falsified the donation of bodies to science “in order to issue an expense for funeral services that they would not have otherwise obtained.” .
The two orders for the transformation of preliminary proceedings into an abbreviated procedure conclude the investigation phase and summon the Prosecutor’s Office and the accused persons to request the opening of an oral trial by formulating an indictment, the dismissal or, exceptionally, the carrying out of complementary proceedings.
Both resolutions can be appealed in reform (before the Court of Instruction 1 of Valencia) and/or in appeal, before the Provincial Court.
#investigated #plot #sold #corpses #universities #funeral #home
