04/08/22018
Miguel Ángel Martínez’s family have been fighting for an investigation for 13 years
In his will, a lovelorn tourist who is said to have thrown himself to his death in the Stockholm archipelago asked to be buried in London beside his former girlfriend.
However, when the body of Miguel Ángel Martínez arrived in the UK there was one problem; his heart was missing. Much of his liver was also gone and there was no sign of water in his lungs to suggest he had drowned.
Now, after 13 years, the Spaniard’s family have been given permission to have his body exhumed from Gunnersbury Cemetery.
Blanca Martínez Santamaría, his sister, believes that Mr Martinez, 45, was killed and his heart was removed. There is speculation that his killers were organ traffickers or that his heart was stolen after he died.
Ms Martínez Santamaría has campaigned since his death for a full investigation. Last week she said that it had been “13 years of fighting, terrible fighting and institutional inaction”.
“We do not know if they killed him, who killed him, why they mutilated him, nobody clarifies anything, it’s hard to imagine a crueller hell,” she told El País.
Mr Martínez, who had lived in the UK for two years and worked at the Royal Brompton Hospital in Chelsea, left his home near Bilbao in April 2005 to travel across Europe by train. Five months later his body washed up on the island of Lidingo.
After a post-mortem examination it was concluded that he had thrown himself from a ferry and drowned. As instructed in his will, Mr Martínez’s body was brought to the UK.
It was only due to a mix-up of paperwork when the body arrived two months later that inconsistencies in the account of his death were raised. Because documents were missing a second post-mortem examination was ordered. According to a report for Westminster coroner’s court, the body “had been previously eviscerated” and “both lungs were present and had been dissected and showed no signs of changes other than changes of decomposition”.
The report concluded: “At the time of the post-mortem examination, it was not possible to identify a specific cause of death due to the absence of the heart.”
The Swedish authorities have insisted that Mr Martínez’s heart was in situ when it left their custody and suggested that it might have putrefied, but other experts doubted that.
The last sighting of Mr Martínez, who had mental health problems, was on August 1, 2005, after he was interviewed by police about an altercation at a bank in Karlstad.
“I have never said that it was the police who killed my brother but I know that something happened at that police station,” his sister said. “And I am sure that some police officers know things that they hid. Whoever killed my brother to remove his organs never counted on me.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/corpse-without-a-heart-exhumed-to-end-mystery-pdb23gcwb