The sidewalks outside the San Isidro courts, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, were once again filled with television cameras, journalists, and onlookers on Thursday morning. After a first failed attempt, these courts are hosting a second trial to determine responsibility for Diego Maradona’s death in November 2020. Now, a new element has cast doubt over the process. The lawyer for one of the accused warned that some of the clinical analyses examined by the medical panel did not belong to the soccer legend but to his father, who was also called Diego Maradona. As a result, a central part of the evidence will have to be reviewed and risks being declared null and void.
Nicolás D’Albora, who represents defendant Nancy Forlini — home care coordinator for the healthcare company Swiss Medical — was the one who pointed out the mistake. It is notable because he was the person who sent the information to the court, but he said he merely forwarded the data without checking it. “There was an inadvertent error by the Swiss Medical laboratory and we noticed it when we were preparing the cross-examination, because there were values that did not match a hospital admission. There we saw the same name, but the membership number and clinical record number did not correspond,” D’Albora said; he is also legal counsel for Swiss Medical.
The medical panel’s report is a key part of a large body of evidence assembled by the San Isidro prosecutor’s office to charge eight people with simple homicide with eventual intent, a crime that carries a sentence of between eight and 25 years in prison. They are all healthcare workers who were responsible for caring for the Argentine World Cup-winning idol while he remained under home hospitalization at his residence in Tigre, in the northern Greater Buenos Aires area. It is known that the footballer died of pulmonary edema resulting from acute heart failure, three weeks after surgery for a chronic subdural hematoma, but the question to be determined is whether the care he received at home was adequate.
In the medical board’s report, signed by 22 professionals, 17 of them assert that medical negligence played a role in Maradona’s death. It has now come to light that some of the laboratory test results reviewed did not belong to Maradona, and the court will have to decide how to proceed.
In that context, prosecutor Patricio Ferrari asked to search the administrative offices of Swiss Medical and two clinics where Maradona was treated to seize his actual medical record. The prosecutor said the healthcare company tried to “deceive them” to “derail the trial.” “They are not going to be able to,” he said during a very tense hearing, in a climate similar to May 2025, when the possibility emerged that former judge Julieta Makintach was making a documentary about the case without authorization — an issue that ended with the trial’s annulment and the magistrate’s removal.
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