A woman’s mummified body has been found in a Costa del Sol flat by a squatter – and she is believed to have died 14 years ago. The grim discovery was made by a man who forced the lock on the property to access it with his 11-year-old daughter.
The pair fled the apartment in Malaga on Monday afternoon after alerting neighbours. Police sources said skeletonization, which is the final stage of decomposition when a corpse’s soft tissues have decayed or dried to the point that the skeleton is exposed, had set in. Initial tests by forensic experts have dated the time of death to around 14 years ago.
Investigators say they suspect the dead woman is a Spanish local who would have been around 85 years old when she passed away. She is believed to have died shortly after losing her husband, although she has yet to be fully identified. They are now trying to trace relatives so they can positively ID her and establish how she might have died.
The apartment block where her body was found has a high rotation of residents. Police sources say the fact the windows were open in the flat where the body was found would have helped reduce the tell-tale smell of a rotting corpse.
In April 2023 a man’s mummified corpse was discovered alongside that of his daughter at their flat in Linda-a-Velha near Lisbon after firefighters and police were called to investigate a bad smell coming from it.
Reports at the time said the dead woman, named only as Anabela, is thought to have died around a week earlier after living with the body of her pensioner dad for 15 years.
And in May 2021 police discovered the decomposing body of a woman in the northern Madrid neighbourhood of Fuencarral said to have been partially eaten by her pet cats. Five of the seven animals were also found dead when officers entered the property.
The dead woman was named at the time as Clara Ines Tobon. Neighbours told local press they believed the Colombian may have died from Covid.
While in September 2019 it emerged a dog survived the death of his cancer-stricken owner by eating part of his body as he lay undiscovered in his Madrid flat for around a month. The dead man reportedly had no flesh left on his legs where the animal devoured his lower limbs to stay alive.
A neighbour raised the alarm after returning from holiday to discover a rancid smell she mistook at first for a dead rat. The dog was sedated before being taken to an animal rescue centre after police got firefighters to force their way into the ground-floor flat in the Madrid neighbourhood of Ciudad Lineal and made the gruesome discovery.
Doctors were said at the time to have estimated the dead man, a 56-year-old prison chef known only as Matias, had died around a month earlier after succumbing to lymphatic cancer.
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