Police say a man kept mummified body of his mother in the basement for more than a year to continue collecting her pension and welfare benefits. An 89-year-old woman is thought to have died of natural causes in June last year after reportedly suffering from dementia.
The 66-year-old suspect lived with his mother in Innsbruck, Tyrol. After she died, he froze her body with icepacks in the basement to guard against the smell. Then he wrapped her in bandages to absorb any bodily fluids.
‘He covered his mother with cat litter and finally the corpse was mummified,’ said Helmut Gufler, head of the police’s social security fraud unit, to ORF. When his brother asked about their mother, he replied that she was in the hospital.
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Each month, the suspect received his mother’s monthly benefits by postal service, but a new postman recently asked to meet the beneficiary. After the son refused, he reported it to the authorities, and the body was discovered on Saturday. He may have illegally received about €50,000 (£42,000) in payments.
The man had no other income and had told Gufler that, if he had reported the death, the payments would have stopped immediately, leaving him unable to pay for his mother’s funeral or to keep the house they had shared.
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