Buenos Aires: A nurse, who was among the last people to see Diego Maradona alive, was questioned on Monday by Argentine prosecutors over allegations of negligence in the football icon’s final days.
Ricardo Almiron, who was Maradona’s nighttime care taker, is doubted of lying when he claimed that the World Cup-winning captain was sleeping and breathing normally hours before he died. The autopsy report showed that he was dying at that time.
Almiron reached just after midday (1500 GMT) with his lawyer at the San Isidro public prosecutor’s office on the outskirts of capital Buenos Aires. He’s one of seven people under examination for manslaughter after a board of experts looking into Maradona’s death found he had got inadequate care and was abandoned to his fate for a ‘prolonged, agonizing period’.
Last November, the football legend died of a heart attack, at the age of 60, just weeks after undergoing brain surgery for a blood clot. An inquiry was initiated following a complaint registered by two of Maradona’s five children against neurosurgeon Leopoldo Luque, whom they blame for their father’s deteriorating condition after the operation.
A panel of 20 medical experts assembled by Argentina’s public prosecutor said last month that Maradona’s treatment was full of ‘deficiencies and irregularities’ and the medical team had left his survival ‘to fate’. The panel said that he ‘would have had a better chance of survival’ with adequate treatment in an appropriate medical facility.
There are some others, who are under investigation, like – Maradona’s psychiatrist Agustina Cosachov, 35, psychologist Carlos Diaz, 29, nurse Dahiana Madrid, 36, nursing coordinator Mariano Perroni, 40, and medical coordinator Nancy Forlini, 52. In the next two weeks, they will appear one by one before the prosecutors, along with their defense lawyers, to reply to the allegations against them.
Last month, the hearings were postponed due to a spike in coronavirus cases in Argentina, which will end with Luque, 39, on June 28.
All the seven, who are being accused, are prohibited from leaving the country and are at risk of having imprisonment of 8 to 25 years, if convicted.
Luque has repeatedly justified his actions, saying ‘I did my best. I offered Diego everything I could: some things he accepted, others not.’ The doctor is trying a displacement of the case and says that Maradona was in depression in his final days.
‘I know that the (coronavirus) quarantine hit him very hard,’ Luque has said. During his lifetime, Maradona had battled cocaine and alcohol addictions.
Maradona has been an idol of millions of Argentines since he motivated the South American nation to win its second World Cup in 1986. His death shocked fans around the world, and tens of thousands queued to file past his coffin, wrapped in the Argentine flag, at the presidential palace in Buenos Aires amid three days of national mourning.
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