The Public Prosecutor’s Office revised its indictment on Wednesday in the Calp cemetery exhumation case, which concerns the remains of a German citizen to bury the grandmother of the City Hall’s Human Resources chief in January 2019. The prosecution asked the Alicante Court to condemn the municipal employee and a former cemetery councilor for administrative prevarication and, in addition, to order repair of the damage by restoring the deceased to the original burial state. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)
The request would entail returning the remains of the German man, Herman August Wilhelm Klatt, who died in 1973, to the niche where the civil servant’s grandmother is interred. An undertaker from Calp testified during the trial that the remains were wrapped in a shroud and buried in a common niche with the man’s identification tag, along with others. The prosecutor urged the court that those charged should cover the costs of this restoration. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)
The former Popular Party councilor for Cemeteries, Bernardo Moll, and the head of Human Resources, Antonio Cabrera, acknowledged their involvement in the procedures leading to the exhumation but denied any irregularities in their conduct. The former councilor, also charged with workplace harassment toward an assistant who refused the exhumation at his request, denied pressuring the employee. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)
Disqualification
The prosecutors have requested thirteen years of disqualification from public employment for the accused, and the accusation of grave desecration has been dropped following explanations provided by the undertaker. For the former councilor, a one-year prison sentence and thirty thousand euros in damages were requested for harassment or coercion of the employee. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)
The private accuser, represented by the former cemetery assistant who witnessed the events, sought one year of imprisonment for Moll for coercion, ten years of disqualification for both defendants for administrative prevarication, and four years in prison for both for a crime of falsification. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrución, oral hearing)
Request for Acquittal
The defendants’ defense teams have requested full acquittal, arguing that the accusations amount to a political stunt and retaliation by the assistant after being placed under disciplinary review related to cemetery workers and a rejected overtime payment claim that the head of Human Resources had assessed in court. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)
The defense for the ex-councilor claimed in their report that the exhumation was legal because the man had been buried for 43 years, and the use-right on the niche was not renewed at the 20-year mark set by the 2017 ordinance. They argued that the right to use the niche through 99 years, as previously stipulated, did not apply. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)
Bernardo Moll stated that a brother of the head of HR pressured for the possibility of burying his grandmother next to his grandfather and said the cemetery official told him that the niche would not be allocated to that family. Moll admitted a keeper refused to perform the exhumation without a written order because the Socialist party had come to take photographs, and he signed a directive authorizing the procedure, a document drafted by the other accused. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)
The head of Human Resources later learned at home about the offer to bury the grandmother beside the grandfather and linked the keeper’s refusal to the disciplinary file opened for charging relatives of the deceased. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)
Harsh Words with the Official
The employee explained that in 2018 the ex-councilor for Cemeteries asked her to prepare a report about reclaiming old concession niches and mentioned needing one near the grandfather’s niche. She told Moll that the technician said it could not be done, and when she relayed this, the then-councilor began to look away and urged her to overlook it and proceed. She refused to sign the exhumation order and that same day was admitted to the emergency room with high blood pressure. She took two months of sick leave, after which colleagues reportedly told her the councilor claimed he would target her when she returned. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)
The retired employee, who served the City Hall from 1993 to 2023, testified that such exhumations were not unheard of, noting that several had occurred for political reasons without the consent of the families involved. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrución, oral hearing)
The current councilor and secretary for the PSOE in Calp, Marco Bittner, testified that he learned a plan to carry out an irregular act at the cemetery and used a funeral to take photographs during the exhumation. He filed three written requests for explanations, and Moll answered only one, stating that the action was proper and compliant with regulations. (Source: Fiscalía anticorrupción, oral hearing)