The owners of a funeral home and two of their employees were arrested in Valencia, in eastern Spain, for trafficking corpses, selling them for 1,200 euros to university medical schools, police said Monday.

The four “falsified documents to take corpses from hospitals and nursing homes, in order to then sell them to universities for research purposes, for 1,200 euros” each, a Spanish police press release explains.

At least eleven corpses were illegally sold in the Spanish metropolis.

The four suspects also secured payments from university schools to help them dispose of bodies that had been studied by cremating them, or placing dismembered limbs in coffins of other people who would be cremated.

They thus charged “€5,040 to a university for 11 cremations of corpses studied, which do not appear on any invoice of the city’s crematoria,” the text explains.

The investigation began in early 2023. Police then found that the two funeral home employees had falsified documents in order to sell a body in a hospital morgue to a university, instead of burying it.

The deceased theoretically should have been buried at his place of residence, at the expense of the municipality. The sale of the body to a university for research purposes was done without the consent of the deceased or anyone else.

Always according to the announcement of the Spanish police, the suspects were looking for “dead people without other family members alive” and “preferably foreigners”.

In another case, they secured the consent of an old man, who was no longer fully conscious, to donate his body to science after his death.

The donation document he signed stipulated “that the body would be delivered to a certain medical school, but in the end it was sent to another” because he simply “paid more”, Spanish police said.