Dozens of families went to the Montjuïc cemetery in Barcelona yesterday to check the state of the niches and tombs of their buried relatives. It was a procession that lasted practically all day. “We have read in La Vanguardia that they had desecrated graves and we have escaped to be calm,” explained a couple, without getting out of the car and on their way to their grandparents’ niche.
The information released this Thursday by this newspaper about the wave of desecration of niches in the Montjuïc cemetery caused great consternation and concern in the government team on duty at the City Council.
Those responsible for Cementiris de Barcelona, ??the municipal company that manages all the cemeteries in the city, already commissioned at the beginning of the crisis an “audit” on the security that Montjuïc currently has.
The looting became known in June, and the last one, with some thirty niches affected, was denounced on July 18. Since that day no more violated tomb has been discovered. Those responsible for the cemetery went to the Mossos d’Esquadra de Sants police station on July 3 and filed a complaint in which they estimated that 160 niches had been desecrated.
However, yesterday there were quite a few cemetery workers who, like last week, unofficially insisted to this newspaper that the number of violated graves is “impossible to calculate” and that there is a “black figure”. significant waste and looting that occurs in the face of the “general lack of control” that reigns in a facility spread over 57 hectares.
The director of Cemeteries, Miquel Trepat, denied again yesterday to this newspaper that there are more looted niches than those denounced. And he recalled that as the desecrations have been discovered, the facility’s management has sent certified letters to the families to communicate the facts and make themselves available to them.
“We trust the investigation being carried out by the police and we hope not only that the events will not be repeated, but that they can identify and arrest the perpetrators,” he said.
As regards security, the City Council has reinforced private security on Montjuïc, with the presence of three more guards for the entire complex. And it has provisionally placed surveillance cameras in strategically important places for researchers that those responsible for the facility hope to be able to install permanently.
The Sants citizen security Mossos maintain patrol rounds in plain clothes and in uniform inside and outside the compound. And the district’s Urban Guard has also incorporated the cemetery into its patrol routes.
“We are waiting to see the results of that audit to improve the security of the site,” said Trepat.
The thefts were discovered in June and at first they went unnoticed because it was believed that it could be the poor condition of the covers of the oldest niches in the cemetery. However, the workers of the enclosure themselves verified that some niches that they had controlled had been violated and the coffins moved.
The investigation unit of the Mossos de Sants has been working since July on a particularly complex issue. No line of work is ruled out. Nor of suspects familiar with the day to day of the cemetery, to mere opportunists who jump the fence and act at night in the presence of a single guard for the entire compound.
The looters are only interested in the dental gold pieces and the jewels with which some families buried their deceased years ago. A practice that practically no one follows anymore, except for someone who previously, before dying, expressly requested to be buried with some special jewel for them.
