“1,200 euros per corpse”: Spanish police dismantle trafficking in bodies sold to medical universities

Human body trafficking has been dismantled by police in Valencia, Spain. The owners of a funeral home illegally sold corpses to medical universities. Four suspects were arrested. The latter “falsified documents to remove the bodies from hospitals and retirement homes in order to later sell them to universities for study, for 1,200 euros per corpse”, specifies the Spanish police in a press release.

“People who have died without family, preferably foreigners”

At least 11 corpses are said to have suffered this fate. The investigation, which began in 2023, allowed police to discover that two employees of the funeral home had falsified documents to sell a body stored in a hospital morgue to a university, instead of burying it. . This deceased was to be buried at his place of residence as part of a funeral financed by the town hall. Its sale to the faculty for study purposes had not received anyone’s consent.

The four suspects had a specific modus operandi. They were looking for “deceased people without family” and “preferably foreigners.” In another case, they managed to obtain written authorization from an old man, who no longer had all his intellectual capacities, to donate his body to science after his death: “(This donation) was “signed for the body to be sent to one medical school, but it was ultimately sent to another, which paid more,” authorities said in the statement.

In addition, the suspects also made the universities pay to help them dispose of the remains already studied. They carried out cremations or they distributed the bodies into coffins of other people who were about to be cremated. They would have thus invoiced “5,040 euros to a university to carry out 11 cremations of bodies studied, which did not appear on any of the invoices issued by the city’s crematoriums”.