an undertaker discovers a 33cm knife stuck in the thorax of a “suicide”

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It is an edifying affair that our colleagues fromObjective Gard revealed, this Friday, November 29, 2024: in the middle of the week, an undertaker of a company of funeral directors from Vigan who were going to embalm the corpse ofa 54-year-old Gardoisdeclared “suicide” in a rest home in Aubagne, in Bouches-du-Rhône, discovered a 33cm knife, blade and handle included, planted under the skin, in the thorax…

The doctor who noted the death concluded that it was suicide, without posing a medico-legal obstacle which led to a police investigation and an autopsy. This time, it will take place and will be practiced this Monday, December 2 at Caremeau University Hospital in Nîmes to confirm a voluntary death or, on the contrary, establish the existence of the intervention of a third party, in short, an assassination. Could the fifty-year-old have self-mutilated with this substantial bladed weapon? Mystery for now.

The undertaker immediately alerted the gendarmes and the public prosecutor of Alès, Abdelkrim Grini opened an investigation to find the causes of the death entrusted to the research brigade of the Vigan company. “The 33 cm knife, handle included, was buried in the dead man's ribcage, but the doctor had not seen it,” he confirms.

This doctor who carried out the findings concluded that it was suicide, because he found a box cutter next to the body of the deceased, but, curiously, he did not notice a wound, nor a suspicious shape in the thorax which could have caused it. cause doubt and refuse to grant the burial permit. In his defense, the knife was buried all the way to the end of the handle and was not visible at first glance in the chest area.

Brought back from Aubagne to Vigan in a hearse, the fifty-year-old was to be buried in a small Cévennes village and it was while washing the mortuary to embalm the body that a funeral director made the incredible discovery. . “He noticed an obstacle while inserting a needle into the deceased’s chest. Intrigued, he discovered the knife under the skin, buried up to the handle,” explains the Alès prosecutor who is awaiting the findings of the autopsy.

“Depending on the results, if the suicide theory is confirmed, the procedure will stop there. But if that of the intervention of a third party, and therefore a possible criminal trail, were to emerge, the investigation would be entrusted to the Marseille prosecutor's office, territorially competent for these facts which occurred in Aubagne”, specifies Abdelkrim Grini, who reveals “never having experienced such a case in 28 years of experience”, a career that began in the legal world as a lawyer specializing in administrative and social procedures, in Montpellier, before continuing in the judiciary.

The Gardois family is also hanging on the conclusions of the autopsy, as are the staff of the Aubagne rest home and the doctor who risks becoming famous in spite of himself.

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