ROME: Sicilian police said on Monday they had arrested a former gravedigger and were investigating 18 others accused of reselling burial sites after removing the corpses already interred in them.

The former gravedigger’s assistant was also arrested on 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 transfer 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 resold, 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 jewellery, from the bodies of those to be buried. Police said they could not comment on what became of the corpses that were removed. But a media report from February last year indicated that in 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.

Published in Dawn, April 15th, 2025