Brazil News
RIO DE JANEIRO – Police in central Brazil arrested a butcher Friday, accusing him of stealing a hand from a corpse inside the city morgue last month. According to testimony before state police in Goias, the man claimed to have been drunk at the time of the act.
According to reports, the butcher told police he was returning home from a nightclub after spending the evening drinking, and as he passed the Goiania City Morgue, he got the idea to sneak in to take pictures of dead bodies. He gained entry without being noticed by security, and once inside, decided to take the hand of a man who had died in a traffic accident.
Upon arriving home, he threw the severed body part into the yard of the house next door, telling police that he wanted to “scare the neighbor,” whom he did not like. The terrified neighbor found the severed hand the next morning, and called police.
Investigators matched the hand to the corpse in the morgue using fingerprints. After reuniting the body parts, the coroner released the body to the dead man’s family for burial.
Police eventually identified the thief, who confessed to the crime, with the help of closed-circuit security recordings. Prosecutors charged the man with “contempt of a corpse,” for which he faces a prison sentence of between one and three years.
