A mummified man’s body was found in an apartment in Vantaa’s Martinlaakso district on Tuesday.
The building’s janitor found the mummy on the floor inside the flat. The caretaker had entered the premises after complaints from the postal services that the slit for letters in the apartment's front door was filled to overflowing.
The police assume that the man had been dead for over a year.
“The inspection of the flat would indicate that the last time there was any movement there was in August of last year”, says Det. Insp. Juha Juurinen.
The body is yet to be formally identified, but the police are assuming that the deceased is the apartment's occupant, a man born in 1944.
Evidently the man was remarkably solitary. By Wednesday the police were still unclear over whether the man had any living relatives. What is known is that the man had divorced a long time ago and that he was a crane mechanic by profession.
The man lived in a studio flat owned by the City of Vantaa on Raikurinne. The landlord had no notice of the man’s fate as the rent had consistently appeared on time on the city’s account.
No suspicions of anything out of ordinary had risen among the neighbours, either.
Other occupants of the same stairwell say that they never detected any smell of a dead body spreading outside the apartment. Even when the man was alive, he was reclusive and was rarely seen moving about.
“He was an older gentleman with a bit of a belly. I reckoned he was fairly ill, as he always took a taxi whenever he went anywhere. He never greeted anyone or said anything”, one of the neighbours explained.
The police do not have suspicions of any foul play in connection with the man’s death. A forensic autopsy will in due course reveal the actual cause of death.
