Crewman in ‘ambulance of death’ case may have mafia link

AN ITALIAN ambulance stretcherbearer has been arrested on suspicion of injecting air into patients’ veins and “selling” their corpses to a funeral parlour for €300 (£265) each.

Davide Garofalo, 42, from Sicily, is alleged to have killed at least three people, and possibly as many as 50, in what has been dubbed the “ambulance of death” investigation.

Mr Garofalo is accused of injecting air into patients as they were transported in the ambulance he crewed, killing them by triggering an embolism – the obstruction of an artery, usually with an air bubble or clot of blood.

Police are now analysing around 50 suspicious deaths in Biancavilla, near Catania, Sicily, in a four-year period ending last year. They are working on the theory that the stretcher-bearer may have been in league with a local clan from Cosa Nostra, Sicily’s mafia.

They think Mr Garofalo, a father of three, sent the dead patients to funeral businesses with links to organised crime. His three alleged victims were a 55-year-old man, an elderly man and an elderly woman.

They were reportedly terminally ill and being taken from the hospital to their homes so that they could die in peace with loved ones.

Another three alleged accomplices are being investigated by police.

The authorities were first alerted by a television investigation, in which an alleged accomplice-turned-informant, a 28-year-old local, said: “People were not dying by the hand of God.”

Raffaele Covetti, a senior police officer, said: “This was a particularly cruel way for these people to die.”

Andrea Bonomo, an anti-mafia investigator, said: “They all had the trust they put in him as a stretcher-bearer betrayed.”