Couple in northern Spain arrested for hiding dead father's body to carry on claiming pension

A woman has been arrested along with her partner on suspicion of hiding her elderly dad’s body “for years” inside the home they shared so they could allegedly keep on claiming his pension.

Police discovered the body in an advanced state of decomposition on his bed in the town of Torrelavega near Spain’s northern Cantabrian coast after a tip-off from a neighbour.

Locals had grown suspicious after asking about the 88-year-old retired mine worker and reportedly getting evasive answers from the pair held.

The bad smell coming from the property where animal mess and bags of rotting rubbish were found had also raised eyebrows.

Torrelavega councillor Pedro Pérez Noriega said: “What we know for now is that the couple have been arrested and that they are also considering whether they suffer from some kind of mental disorder, because the truth is that the home was in a deplorable condition.”

The arrests were made by officers from Spain’s National Police force, who say there is nothing at this stage pointing to the pensioner suffering a violent death but believe it went unreported "for several years".

The unidentified neighbour who raised the alarm is understood to have contacted social services who called in police.

The bedroom he was found in was reportedly filled with rubbish like the rest of the property.

A source close to the ongoing inquiry told a local paper, claiming the couple had subsequently confessed to hiding the OAP’s body after he died of ‘natural causes’ so they could carry on claiming his pension: “They denied the man was dead even though it was clear we had discovered a corpse.

“The conditions they lived in were not those of normal people, and the possibility that there may be something more is being considered, which is why they want to rule out other issues with a psychiatric examination.”

The unnamed woman arrested is 50 and her partner 60 years old.

They are likely to face charges of abandoning a person in an at-risk situation as well as Social Security fraud and misappropiation of the dead man’s assets.

It was not immediately clear today how much pension money they had allegedly claimed before cops discovered the OAP’s body.

The dead man, a former worker at the Reocin Mine in Cantabria which was once the largest zinc deposit in Europe, is said to have been on a good pension.

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