Macabre scandal in Trapani in Sicily. Sicilian police said on Monday that they had arrested a former gravedigger, suspected of having set up an illegal system of exhumation and resale of burials. With payments hidden in the form of “coffee director”, in the words of the investigators, he proposed to certain families express burials, made possible by the clandestine eviction of deceased already buried.
The survey, which also targets 18 other people, has highlighted a local corruption network involving three funeral firing companies, now forbidden to exercise. For several years, the inhabitants of the city denounced chaos and the irregularities that have reigned in the municipal cemetery. This climate of disorganization would have enabled certain agents, with the support of private providers, to divert official procedures for their benefit.
A vast traffic of all kinds
According to police, the former employee voluntarily blocked the intervention of the company legally mandated for funeral services, while promoting incriminated companies. He would also have undertaken “extraordinary exhumation procedures” in order to release concessions and resell them illegally.
The gravedigger is also accused of having proposed masonry work on private chapels at advantageous prices, bypassing the municipal tax, as well as having organized a system for recovering fresh floral compositions, then sold by accomplices florists.
A similar case in Calabria
Suspicions also relate to golden flights in gold taken from the bodies before burial. Police said they could not confirm what happened to the exhumed remains. An article from a local newspaper, published in February 2024, reports, however, that a family, discovering an unknown name on its family tomb, had found the body of their loved one in a bag, relegated to the other end of the cemetery.
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This affair is not the first of its kind. Two weeks earlier, in Calabria, the former goalkeeper of the Tropea cemetery and his son were sentenced to several years in prison for having literally emptied the graves, dismembered decaying bodies using saws and knives to make room. The investigators had filmed the scenes.
