Sicilian police said Monday they had arrested a former gravedigger and were investigating 18 others accused of re-selling burial sites after removing the corpses already interred in them.
The former gragravedigger’svedigger’s assistant was also arrested 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 locals.
In their probe, 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.
He made decisions “on extraordinary exhumation procedures”, in which municipal burial niches were cleared of bodies so they could be re-sold, police said in a statement.
“In this way, he would propose quick burials, in exchange for sums of money, which he called ‘coffee for the burial director’,” they said.
He is also accused of bringing in his own bricklayer to do work on private burial chapels, offering citizens a discount through the non-payment of city tax, and alerting compliant local florists of freshly laid floral arrangements on tombs, which they took and resold.
Police also believe the ex-worker took valuables, such as gold jewelry, from the bodies of those to be buried.
Contacted by AFP, police said they could not comment on what became of the corpses that were removed.
But a local media report from February 2024 indicated that in at least one case, a family who found their relative’s burial place with a new name on it ultimately located their loved-one’s corpse in a bag, along with others, in another part of the cemetery.
Cemeteries and funeral parlours are often controlled by the mafia in areas of Italy where those criminal organisations are entrenched, or by corrupt local officials.
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 news reports called a “cemetery of horrors”.
The pair had removed decomposing corpses to make way for new burials, and were captured on police surveillance videos dismembering the bodies with saws and knives, before throwing them away or burning them.
They were arrested in February 2021 for the scheme prosecutors said had gone on “for years”.
