Croatian authorities arrested an Austrian national on suspicion of trying to smuggle a corpse, after he was stopped at a border crossing with a dead woman in the passenger seat of his car, police said on Tuesday.
The 65-year-old man was detained at the Gunja border crossing with Bosnia in late November after presenting travel documents for himself and another passenger, police told AFP in a statement.
Officers then became suspicious after noticing that the female passenger was “unconscious and uncommunicative.”
The police called a coroner to the scene, who found that the passenger was dead.
Authorities said the 83-year-old woman had died in Bosnia and that the driver had tried to take her body to Austria to “avoid formalities related to the transport of the deceased,” the statement added.
The police have not detailed the relationship between the two, but local media have described the man as the legal guardian of the deceased.
Police said the case had been formally handed over to the country’s prosecutors.
Drivers in the US have also been found with dead bodies in their vehicles for various reasons. Last year, a man in Texas was arrested after a a man’s body was found inside his car nearly 40 miles from where police believe he was hit by the car.
In 2014, a Detroit-area man said he refused to stop and contact authorities after one of his passengers died during a trip to Michigan from Arizona because he was afraid of being jailed if the police investigated. Four years earlier, police said a Southern California woman drove around with a homeless woman for months mummified body in his passenger seat.