Six months suspended prison sentence for the undertaker, 5,000 euros fine for his subcontractor. The Bastia Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced two individuals prosecuted for “harming the integrity of corpses”. The so-called “Bigorno coffins” affair dates back to last April, when Christophe Graziani, the mayor of this small town of 80 inhabitants located in Haute-Corse, spotted three coffins on the roadside, mixed with other rubble in the middle of a wild dump on private land.
On the spot the gendarmes discovered, among the waste, several garbage bags containing human remains and bones of three different bodies whose date of death was prior to 2004. “It is a professional fault. My client has shown negligence and clumsiness in an area that should be filled with delicacy, ”reacted Me Philippe Gatti. The lawyer for the subcontractor responsible for evacuating the bodies finds the penalty of 5,000 euros fair (it was more or less the sum received for this work) and does not intend to appeal for his client, aged 70 .
No practice ban has been issued.
On this day in March, the boss of the funeral directors had entrusted him with the task of exhuming seven bodies from a family vault that the heir to the concession, aged and residing on the continent, wanted to return to the town. Convinced that he had emptied all the coffins and placed the remains in a body bag brought to the crematorium, the subcontractor returned the next day to collect the coffins and other packed rubble, which he therefore savagely got rid of. Problem, there were still bones among them.
“This story was very shocking in the village and in Corsica where we are used to being close to the deceased and treating them with respect”, remembers Christophe Graziani, who finds the sentences light. “There had been a whole media fuss at the time, but I think it was a little deflated, especially since the family of the deceased did not constitute a civil party”, adds Me Philippe Gatti. No prohibition to exercise was pronounced in this judgment.