Diego Maradona had a stomach “like a balloon,” a witness said this Thursday in the trial for the star’s death in 2020, while images of his body were exposed for the first time in this second trial, after the first was annulled in 2025.
“He was very swollen, with a very swollen face, swollen limbs, globular abdomen. He was like a balloon,” this is how doctor Juan Carlos Pinto, who arrived with the ambulance at the idol’s house on the day of his death, on November 25, 2020, described Maradona in court.
During the new hearing of the process taking place in the courts of San Isidro, about 30 km north of Buenos Aires, images and a 17-minute video were exposed showing the room and the lifeless body of the former soccer player.
Filmed by the scientific police, the video showed the ’10’ in shorts and with a sports shirt raised, which allowed us to see a brutally swollen stomach.
Before the images, Pinto gave a detailed description of Maradona’s body, a crude story that caused Gianinna, one of the daughters of ‘Pelusa’ present in the room, to cry.
Then, while the video was projected, he covered his face so as not to see his father in that state.
Seven health professionals, doctors, psychiatrists and nurses are being tried for the second time since last week for ‘homicide by possible intent’, a figure that implies that they were aware that their actions could cause Maradona’s death.
“A normal room”
The world champion with Argentina in 1986 died at the age of 60 from cardiorespiratory arrest and pulmonary edema in a rented residence in Tigre, north of Buenos Aires, where he had to recover from uncomplicated neurosurgery performed three weeks earlier.
The trial seeks to determine, among other things, whether that modality was appropriate.
Police and doctors who testified on Thursday stressed that the house and the room where Maradona was to spend his convalescence did not look adequate for that task.
“There was no defibrillator, oxygen, nothing. Inside the room there were no elements to say that the patient was in home confinement,” noted Pinto.
“I saw it as a normal room, not as a place for a person’s treatment. Like a room in my house,” Deputy Commissioner Lucas Farias, one of the police officers who went to the scene that fateful day in November, said before Pinto.
All the accused, although with different strategies, claim innocence. He will face sentences of between 8 and 25 years in prison.
A first trial in 2025 was annulled after more than 20 hearings amid a scandal because a judge participated in a clandestine documentary about the process, with herself as the protagonist. After the controversy, she was dismissed.
The second trial will have about 120 witnesses and, at a rate of two hearings per week, is expected to last at least until July.
