Worker fired after selfie with body

BUENOS AIRES • A funeral worker has incurred the wrath of Argentinians after photos that went viral on social media showed that the man had taken a selfie with the corpse of Diego Maradona.

The Argentina football legend died aged 60 on Wednesday after suffering a heart attack.

Diego Molina - who was fired by the Sepelios Pinier funeral parlour once the pictures were leaked - had been tasked, along with his colleagues, to prepare his body for a private open-coffin wake.

That wake was open only to family and friends, and took place before the public state funeral, with Maradona just the second non-president after Formula One great Juan Manuel Fangio to receive such an honour.

However, Molina desecrated the 1986 World Cup winner's body by posing for a photo with his hand resting on Maradona's forehead and showing the thumbs-up sign.

Two of his colleagues - one of them did the same thumbs-up gesture - also posed for pictures, invoking widespread revulsion.

Maradona's lawyer Matias Morla called out Molina, vowing to take legal action and tweeting: "This is the author of the photo taken beside Maradona's coffin.

"He's Pinier's head of burials. Diego Molina is the swine that took the picture of himself alongside Maradona. For the memory of my friend, I'm not going to rest until he pays for this atrocity."

Death threats have since been issued against Molina, with one netizen tweeting: "I want this fat baldie who took a picture of himself by Diego's body dead. I want him dead. DEAD."

Diego Picon, the manager of the funeral home, on Thursday apologised on local TV channel TN, but claimed Molina and the other two workers were "outsourced employees".

"My father is 75 years old and he is crying, I am crying, my brother too, we are destroyed," he said.

"He is not an employee here, he is a third party who only helped us load the coffin... The family chose a cedar box that is very difficult to transport and that is why we summoned him, just to carry the box."