There are too many dead people who haven’t been visited for a long time, nor have their niche been cleaned, nor have candles been lit or flowers brought to them.
The Mossos d’Esquadra are investigating more than 160 desecrations of graves that have occurred in recent months in the Montjuïc cemetery in Barcelona. Looting to steal jewels and gold from the dead could be much bigger. Some cemetery workers have unofficially assured La Vanguardia that the number of violent niches could exceed 300, although the director of Cemeteries, Miquel Trepat, denies this last figure.
It shudders just to think that someone is able to break the slab that protects a niche to rummage through human remains in search of jewelry and gold dental pieces. But theft is the only motive that justifies a wave of desecrations so great that on July 3 a member of the legal team of the public company that manages the cemeteries filed a complaint with the Mossos d’Esquadra police station of Sants-Montjuïc. This official gave a statement and put the number of assaults at 160.
Since that day, the Sants investigation unit has been in charge of inquiries that are not simple. And not precisely because they don’t work there. They follow several lines that, at the moment, do not give the expected results.
Since the beginning of the wave of desecrations, which those responsible for the cemetery place between May and July, the Catalan police in coordination with the Barcelona Urban Guard have made two joint night devices to try to surprise the assailants in fraganti . Sants’ public security patrols circulate frequently outside and inside the cemetery, alert to any suspicious movement.
On July 10, a joint team of plainclothes officers from both forces went into the cemetery, using drones with thermal cameras to try to detect any suspicious movement, to no avail. Research is particularly complicated. As Miquel Trepat reminds this newspaper, Montjuïc is more than 150 years old, houses more than 175,000 graves and includes 57 hectares with corners, unevenness and dead ends that make police work difficult and favor hiding or going unnoticed.
The last recorded theft was reported on July 18. The next day, the cemetery officials alerted the Mossos to the desecration of thirty niches. Since then, the site workers have not detected any more open graves.
It is difficult to pinpoint when this thief or thieves began to plunder niches. And it’s complicated because there are many tombs in Montjuïc that are in a very bad state. The oldest ones, without tombstones or anyone to look after them, were closed at the time with a slab that in the 1960s was made of very poor quality concrete. A material that has cracked over time. This explains why the first desecrations went unnoticed, because it was thought that the slab had been broken by the passage of time or even by the vibrations of the heavy machinery of the works that have been carried out in the cemetery.
But as new violent niches were detected in some areas where the workers perfectly remembered having seen them well, the alarms went off. Someone desecrated niches and removed human remains in search of pieces of gold, jewelry or even watches with which the deceased were buried.
Nowadays, hardly anyone buries their loved ones with valuables. Burying the dead with their jewelry has been reduced to a few cultures like the gypsy, which does maintain the tradition. None of the many cemeteries of gypsy families in Montjuïc has been violated, say the same sources. The desecrated are mostly old and without headstones.
Trepat showed “concern” about some events that he described as “isolated” for what it means for some families to whom the incidents have begun to be communicated. The cemetery has sent certified letters to convey the facts and a few have replied. “Neither the holidays nor the age of the niches help us. That’s why some letters have already been returned because the senders don’t even exist”. The director of Cemeteries assures that so far all the families contacted have been “understandable” and “grateful” for the information.
Cementiris is part of the conglomerate of public companies Barcelona Municipal Services (BSM). On its official page you can see the surveillance services contracted for all cemeteries in the city, including Montjuïc, which only has two private security guards during the day and one at night, all from the Clece Seguridad company. But Trepat assures that in recent weeks security has increased exceptionally with three more private guards and the provisional placement of new surveillance cameras in strategic locations. It is expected that, over time, they will settle there permanently. The police work has been intense. The Mossos have already checked whether any of the numerous workers at the site or the various companies that operate there have sold any jewelery in an official establishment in recent weeks. And the truth is that they found one. But the suspect was ruled out after he confessed that the material he sold at a jewelry store corresponded to several pieces of gold he found in a niche that he was authorized to clean once he had expired and had to move the remains in the ossuary
Investigators have managed to coordinate better with cemetery workers each time they discover a new desecration. They no longer touch the niche and wait for the scientific police of the Mossos to arrive, who at the moment have a palm print on one of the desecrated graves.
Another of the lines that was investigated was that of two Serbian citizens who forgot in the hostel room where several dental pieces were kept. They checked the data and also discarded it.
