Police have found 381 corpses stacked up in a private crematorium in northern Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, the local prosecutor said Sunday and attributed the ugly finding to negligence.
“Previously, we have 381 organs that were deposited irregularly in the crematorium, which was not cremated,” said Eloy Garcia, communications coordinator of Chihuahua State Prosecutor’s Office to AFP.
Garcia said the bodies were “stacked” without any obvious order in different rooms in the building where the crematorium operates.
They were “just thrown like that, undeveloped, one on top of the other, on the floor,” he said.
All bodies had been embalmed.
Instead of ash, relatives got “other material,” Garcia said.
Authorities considered that some of the remains could have been there for up to two years.
Garcia accused “carelessness and irresponsibility” of crematorium owners and added that all such companies “know what their daily cremation capacity is.”
“You can’t take more than you can treat,” he said.
One of the administrators of the crematorium had already turned to prosecutors.
Authorities did not specify whether the bodies belonged to victims of criminal violence.
Mexico, a country that is severely affected by organized crime, has for years suffered from a crisis in its forensic system, saturated by the high number of bodies to be treated, the lack of staff and budget limits.
