Online Reporter
BUENOS AIRES. − Football legend Diego Maradona spent his last days in a “house of horror”, a prosecutor claimed during a trial over the sporting icon’s death in Argentina.
The World Cup winner’s home care was “reckless and deficient”, according to chief prosecutor Patricio Ferrari as he described the seven defendants on trial.
The defendants − who were called a bunch of “people who improvised” − are charged with homicide and face up to 25 years in jail if convicted.
Mr Ferrari told a Buenos Aires court that the carers were “absolutely indifferent” to the consequences of poor care provided to Maradona, delivering a hard hitting speech at the start of the trial.
The prosecutor said: “You will see during this trial what reckless home care is, reckless, deficient, without precedent, without any type of control during the period that ended with Diego’s death.
“They co-operated in putting into place a series of factors or circumstances that increased the permitted risk to generate the death of Diego Armando Maradona which is something we say they were absolutely different to.”
The prosecutor shocked the room by holding up a grim picture of the player’s last day, which showed the Argentinian icon lying on his back with his bloated stomach exposed under a lifted-up black T-shirt.
“This is the way he died,” Ferrari told the court.
Over 100 witnesses are set to give evidence in this trial, which will focus on the care he received at a house in Tigre when he died from heart failure in November 2020.
Just before he died in 2020, he had returned to the house from a blood clot operation at a hospital. − The Sun
Mathew Masinge