Tatiana Neroeva buried Faraj Allah Jarjour believing him to be her husband, whose body she is still waiting for
14ymedio, Madrid, 29 May 2024 — Thousands of kilometers away from Montreal, where the family of Faraj Allah Jarjour resides — the Canadian tourist who died in Cuba last March — a woman, Tatiana Neroeva, waits for corpse of her husband Ilya in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The destinies of both men were united when the Cuban Government sent the wrong bodies to their widows, an error which for the Russian woman is hardly coincidental.
“I suspect that my husband died violently. The replacement of the bodies did not happen by chance, but intentionally,” she said last week in an interview with Russia Today.
Neroeva affirms that her husband, who was on vacation on the island in March, had agreed to exchange currency in the informal market at a very advantageous price for the first day of his stay. He went to change the money and was never seen alive again. The body was found in the sea,” she explained.
“He went to change the money and was never seen alive again. The body was found in the sea”
Her version coincides with that of Anna Neroeva, Ilya’s daughter, who days before denounced Cuba’s lack of interest in clarifying the facts. “Most likely, the country’s authorities simply don’t want to know what happened. As for my father, I only know that he went to change money and didn’t come back,” she said.
Both Anna and Tatiana suspect that the Cuban authorities sent a different body in order to hide an alleged criminal act that could be detected with n autopsy. Although, they claim, they had doubts when receiving the body, the burial was carried out.
“I was in shock. My relatives asked me questions: ‘Who is this? Why does he look so different?’ The priests assured me that it is normal for these types of changes to occur when embalming the body,” said the deceased’s daughter.
A few days later, they received a call to alert them of what happened in Canada. “It turned out that the body of a Canadian was sent from Cuba to Chelyabinsk and the other body is in Canada,” she added. Since then, cooperation between both parties – including the Canadian Prosecutor’s Office – has been constant.
“We will have a DNA test and an exhumation to send to the Canadians. They said that they did not bury my father, who is still in the morgue. That is, for two months,” added Neoreva, who affirms – without data – that she has heard of more cases similar to her father’s.
This April, Faraj Allah Jarjour’s daughter gave an interview to a Canadian television channel in which, with relief, she related the case. “Until now I felt lost, I had to look for my father’s body. At least we now know where he is,” she declared, after learning that the Cuban authorities had delivered the body to Russia, where he was buried.
More distrustful, the employees of the Canadian funeral home that received Jarjour’s alleged body were not satisfied when they compared it with the photographs provided by the relatives and raised the alarm.
More distrustful, the employees of the Canadian funeral home that received Jarjour’s alleged body were not satisfied when comparing it with photographs
The body of the deceased – due to a heart attack – had remained on a beach chair covered with a sheet for more than eight hours (from 3:30 p.m. to midnight), according to relatives. Afterwards, the morgue employees came to pick him up with a simple car, not an ambulance or a funeral van.
At the end of April, the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, spoke with her Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodríguez, about the case and the Cuban Foreign Minister stated on X that the Cuban authorities were investigating what happened, while expressing his “condolences and apologies” to the family of the Canadian citizen.
At that time it was not yet known that the body was thousands of kilometers away, buried in the grave of a man twenty years his junior. While the facts are clarified, the families are still waiting to be able to bury the deceased person that belongs to them.
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