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 the sale of corpses donated to science.
The magistrate considers that, from the procedures carried out, there are sufficient indications of the commission of crimes of fraud and falsification of documents both public and private, as reported in a statement by the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencian Community (TSJCV).
The instructor has issued two abbreviated procedure orders against the same people involved – two employees and two managers of the funeral home – in the framework of the two cases 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 Hospital La Fe in Valencia, and later taken to a private university in Valencia, 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 employee’s real identity -one of those investigated- from the funeral home that 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 of 1,331 euros in January 2023 which, however, was annulled in May of that same year.
The second of the cases investigated by the same court affected the procedures carried out by the same funeral home with respect to the bodies of seven other deceased people 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.
They actually appear in the case nine invoices for cremation of corpses for amounts ranging between 1,331 and 1,784 euros transferred to a private university between January 2018 and 2023 without any evidence that “it was carried out in any crematorium in Valencia, with the mortal remains cremated along with other others,” says the instructor.
There are also two other invoices issued in 2021 to the Faculty of Medicine of a public university in Valencia for the funeral procedures of two other cases in which cremation is not recorded either.
“A painful plot”
“In this plot of unjust enrichment at the expense of the CEU University and the Faculty of Medicine of Valenciain a somewhat painful way, as these are activities involving corpses” -the judge continues in his resolution-, which despite being considered an “object” in law, it cannot be forgotten that they are “human remains, of people who have died.” , to whom 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 oral trial formulating a document of accusationthe dismissal or, exceptionally, the practice 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.
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