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Spain body mix up as man who wished to be buried is cremated by mistake
The woman who was supposed to be cremated almost turned up at another family’s funeral
The Junta de Andalucía has opened an investigation into an error in identification of two bodies in Spain.
The mix up has led to the cremation of a man in Cádiz who should have been buried in Málaga. The other body, belonging to a woman, almost ended up at the funeral of the wrong family.
Both bodies arrived at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Cádiz at the same time and it was there that the mix up occurred. The mistake led to the cremation of the man instead of the woman.
The Andalusian Government has already opened an investigation into how the confusion occurred. Everyone involved, including the Institutes of Legal Medicine of Cádiz and Málaga, have already contacted the families to apologise.
Sources from the Ministry of Justice have indicated that “it is a situation that should never have occurred”.
They say there are collaboration protocols in place to prevent this type of mistake from happening.
The deceased man’s last wish, as he had always expressed to his daughters, was to be buried next to his mother in the Rincón de la Victoria cemetery.
After the death, two employees went to the deceased’s home to speak with his daughter and find out how he wanted the burial to be. She told them the most important thing was to bury her father, as he wished, and for him not to be cremated.
“He wanted to be with his mother in Rincón and for us to bring him flowers, that was the only thing he said,” the young woman stressed.
“On Sunday, at about half past one, they called me from the court in Cádiz and asked me if I had [contacted] a funeral home [to perform the ceremony], that my father was there and that no one had picked him up,” the young woman told the newspaper.
She heard nothing more from them until this Monday, when the director of the Institute of Legal Medicine in Cadiz called her, telling them what had happened: “He asked me if I was the daughter and told me that there had been a double error, that my father had been mistakenly handed over to another funeral home and that the relatives had cremated the body.”
