Bergamo (Italy) (AFP)
Families and relatives of victims of the new coronavirus filed about fifty complaints Wednesday at the public prosecutor's office in Bergamo, in northern Italy, the first legal action of its kind in the peninsula where the epidemic has killed nearly 34,000 people.
Accompanied by their lawyers, members of the "Truth and Justice for Victims of Covid-19" Committee, born on Facebook and with 55,000 members, submitted 50 complaints to the prosecutor's office in Bergamo, martyr city of Lombardy (north) and epicenter of the epidemic that struck Italy from the beginning of February to May.
"We don't want revenge, we want justice," said Stefano Fusco, 31, whose grandfather died in March, one of the founders of this Facebook group.
The complaints were filed in Bergamo because "this city is the symbol of the tragedy that affected the whole country," said Fusco.
They expose the tragedies experienced individually by each of these families (lack of information, deficient care or care ...) which will be examined by the prosecutor's office. The latter will then decide on possible prosecutions and if necessary the classification of the facts.
Cristina Longhini, pharmacist, lost her father Claudio, 65, during the pandemic in a hospital in Bergamo. "My father had just retired, he was in great shape when he was infected," she says.
The emergency room initially refused to admit him on the pretext that he had no breathing difficulties, she recalls. At the Covid-19 hospital in town, there were no more beds available in intensive care.
"And when he died, they forgot to call us. I finally went to identify his body, he was barely recognizable, his mouth open, his eyes swollen out of the sockets, with tears of blood," said Ms. Longhini.
"They gave me his personal belongings, including bloody - and therefore contaminated - clothes in a garbage bag."
The local cemeteries being saturated, his coffin was transported, with a dozen others, by military truck to a destination unknown to the family, which finally discovered that the body had been cremated 200 km away by receiving by mail the invoice from the funeral home.
© 2020 AFP