Death of Diego Maradona ‘treated as possible culpable homicide’ while searching the doctor’s house

Investigators investigating Diego Maradona’s death ordered a search of the home and his personal doctor’s office amid local reports that he is now being treated as a possible wrongful death case.

The searches began Sunday morning.

The prosecutors behind the order, which is said to have been sanctioned by a judge, are understood to be trying to establish whether the soccer legend was the victim of medical malpractice.

The dramatic turn in the investigation into Maradona’s death followed overnight reports that he had rowed with personal physician Leopoldo Luque in the days before he suffered from heart failure last Wednesday.

Luque is at home while the search takes place on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Local television stations are broadcasting images of the police entering Luque’s clinic.

The records were ordered after Maradona’s daughters, Dalma and Giannina, gave statements and questioned whether the medication their father was receiving was appropriate.

Argentine media report that Luque could be questioned as a “defendant,” someone who is under official investigation on suspicion of possible malpractice or negligence, rather than a simple witness.

There is no suggestion that you will be charged with any crime at this stage of the investigation.

Maradona’s lawyer, Matías Morla, demanded a high-level investigation last week into the emergency response to the retired soccer player’s death.

Matías Morla said that the first ambulance took more than half an hour to reach the rented house north of Buenos Aires where the former star from Naples and Barcelona suffered cardiac arrest.

He called the delay a “criminal idiocy.”

Morla also complained that Maradona had not received a medical check-up in the 12 hours before his death, which appears to put more pressure on the former soccer player’s personal doctor, Leopoldo Luque.

It later emerged that the first ambulance took 11 minutes to reach the private San Andrés farm near Buenos Aires that Maradona moved to after leaving the hospital on November 11 following his brain blood clot operation.

It emerged on Saturday that Maradona’s nurse had admitted that she lied about a morning check on Maradona.

The sensational confession added more mystery to the circumstances surrounding his untimely death.

Initial reports suggested that a 24-year-old nephew who was staying with him at the San Andrés home was the last person to see him alive at breakfast the day Diego died.

He is said to have told his relative, “I don’t feel well” before going back to bed and dying in his sleep, before investigators were told that he had never gotten up on Wednesday to eat anything.

Diego’s nephew told investigators that he last saw him when he went to bed around 11 p.m. Tuesday.

An uneaten late-night sandwich was one of the items police found in her room.

A night shift nurse told investigators that she had seen Maradona “sleeping and breathing normally in bed” at around 6.30am on Wednesday morning.

A report in the hands of state prosecutors leading an investigation into the retired soccer player’s death, leaked to the Argentine media and signed by a nurse named locally Dahiana Gisela Madrid, who took office at approximately the same time, says: “At 6.30 am I started my shift and the patient was resting.

“At 7.30 in the morning you can hear him moving inside his room. At 8.30 am he continues to rest. At 9:20 in the morning he refuses to have his vital signs checked. “

The health report from private medical firm Medidom is now at the center of an ongoing investigation after the nurse reportedly told investigators that she had never entered Diego’s room the morning of his death. to see how it was.

The local news agency Télam, citing judicial sources in a report that was widely reported in the Argentine press, said the nurse had claimed in her second sworn statement that she had been “made to lie” for the Medidom report.

“What the witness added in that second statement is that she was made to write in a report for Medidom, where she is part of the nursing team that cares for people who receive home health care, who had tried to monitor Maradona’s vital signs when she was The reality is that she let him rest, ”the report said.

It was not clear whether she claimed that her bosses had forced her to file the “false” report amid concerns that they would be charged with negligence in Maradona’s death, or that others had forced her hand.

A psychiatrist and psychologist who was part of Diego Maradona’s care team, named Susana Cosachov and Carlos Díaz, is said to have entered the room shortly before noon and made several unsuccessful attempts to resuscitate him before calling 999.

A recording of the call made by Maradona’s personal doctor, Leopoldo Luque, to the emergency services, in which he claimed to have suffered a presumed cardiac arrest, has already leaked to Argentine media.

The former Naples and Barcelona star, who was only 60 years old, was pronounced dead around noon on Wednesday.

Initial autopsy results revealed that the recovering cocaine addict, who also had a problem with alcohol, had suffered from heart failure causing pulmonary edema.

Doctors are also said to have detected dilated cardiomyopathy, a medical condition in which the heart muscle becomes weak and enlarged and cannot pump enough blood to the rest of the body.

Pulmonary edema, the accumulation of fluid in the lung tissue and air spaces, is caused by heart problems in most cases.

State prosecutors are analyzing CCTV images from cameras on the farm where Diego lived and the mobile phones of the nurses who cared for him in the hours before his death.

They said that after his death in his opening comments there was nothing that pointed to any criminality and said that everything so far suggests that the former footballer died of natural causes.

Leopoldo Luque was not in the rented house Maradona was using when he died.

A judicial source told the respected Argentine newspaper La Nación: “As Luque was Maradona’s personal doctor, the decision was made to search his home and have surgery to search for documents that could determine whether, during Maradona’s treatment at home, there were irregularities.” .

Investigators are believed to be seeking details of the drug being administered to Maradona, as well as his health records and other documents that could play a key role in the investigation.

Thirty police officers and judicial officials are said to be at Luque’s home and another at his work address.

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