SAN ISIDRO.- A doctor who treated Diego Maradona and then witnessed his autopsy, he assured that the idol could have improved in 48 hours if he had been given a diuretic, in the trial held in Argentina due to the death of ‘Diez’ in 2020.
“He had fluid in the pericardium, in the pleura, in the abdomen,” said the intensivist. Mario Schiter. “(With a diuretic) in approximately 48 hours he should have been frankly better,” said the expert who treated Maradona in the early 2000s and then participated as an observer in the autopsy in 2020.
The doctor said he saw “patients like this daily in intensive care, who arrive with congestive insufficiency.”
“We relieve them of volume with diuretics and after 12 hours they are already at home,” he said.
Schiter testified for almost five hours in the tenth hearing of the trial taking place in San Isidro, 30 kilometers north of Buenos Aires.
His testimony joined those of the dozen experts who pointed out that Maradona had “water everywhere” at the time of death, due to the amount of edema found in his body.
The world champion with Argentina in 1986 died of pulmonary edema and cardiorespiratory arrest on November 25, 2020, when he was undergoing a home stay for uncomplicated neurosurgery performed three weeks earlier.
Scandal in court
The main accused, the neurosurgeon and family doctor of the ‘Diez’, Leopoldo Luque, was involved in a scandal that ended with the abrupt suspension of the day’s session.
Luque played the video of the former soccer player’s autopsy without warning about the images it contained. One of the idol’s daughters was present in the room, Gianinnawho was unable to leave the hearing before images of his father’s body were shown.
When the video of the idol’s lifeless body was projected, Gianinna Maradona He ran towards the exit shouting “You’re a son of a bitch!”
During the hearings, which Gianinna frequently attends, these types of images are often reproduced. But the lawyers always give advance notice so that she can leave the room.
In addition to Luque, six other health professionals face charges of homicide with possible intent, which implies that they were aware that their actions could lead to death. They could face up to 25 years in prison. An eighth defendant will be tried separately in a jury trial.
This is the second trial. The first was annulled in 2025 by a judge who was making a clandestine documentary.
