A German shipping company has apologised for a ‘very unfortunate incident’, as the three filled urns appeared on a few Dutch beaches at the end of december.
Stuffing put an end to speculation at the time, and many wondered how the dog had ended up there, and what was in them.
The typing of several international media, including The Guardian, Algemeen Dagblad and Ostzee-Zeitung.
According to the Dutch media RTL News is stuffing all from the same crematorium. They are found over the last five days of a 14-year-old boy, a fisherman and a woman on the beaches of, respectively, Katwijk and Noordswijk, located to the north of the Hague on the Dutch coast.
Urnernes aluminium lids were all marked with the date of birth, date of death and selected ‘pick up’ from Greifswald the weather conditions in the northern German city of Mecklenburg-western Pomerania – almost 750 kilometres away.
We examined them, because we thought that it could be used to hide something – for example, drugs, tells the 14-year-old Maarten van Duijn, who was one of those who found an urn, to KustNieuws.
He says, that they had made a survey of the contents of the urn. It turned out that it was the ash from the people who were in them. But the more they found, the more bizarre it seemed.
– After to have picked things up on the beach in 30 years, I thought I had seen everything. But I have never seen a full urn. Sometimes we see an empty urn, which probably have fallen overboard, in the context of that you have distributed the ashes in the sea, but the three filled urns? wondered Maartens father Leen over for the Algemeen Dagblad.
According to the German media Ostzee-Zeitung it was a great mystery, how the stuffing ended up in the water. For there are ‘strict rules in Germany for how to handle the remains of deceased persons’.
A spokesman from the district attorney in Stralsund, which covers the Greifswald area, tells to Ostzee-Zeitung, that the case is ‘exceptional’, and that the prosecutor investigated whether there could have been a crime – indecent dealings with equal – which required a formal investigation.
But on Wednesday came the answer from the Dutch company Trip Scheepvaart of Scheveningen, who belongs in the Hague. The company says that there was planned a massebegravelse to the sea, but something went horribly wrong, as the box with the three urns in the ‘slipped out of the hand of an employee and fell into the sea’.
Silvia Ross, acting spokeswoman for the company, tells the German news agency DPA that the company now has buried the contents from two of the three urns to the sea, and that they soon will do the same with the third urn.
