Conmen take a corpse to post office – and try to claim his pension

TWO men strolled into a post office and propped a corpse against the counter in a bid to claim the dead man’s pension.

The bizarre scam was only foiled when staff asked about the well-being of the elderly gentleman and the pair laid the body on the floor.

Police said the men had arrived at the post office with their arms around the shoulders of the body after previously being informed that a recipient of a pension had to be present to collect it.

When questioned about the pale appearance of the elderly man, one of the pair reportedly said: ‘He’s grand. We’re going to bring him down to the hospital when we get the money.’

Staff at the post office in Carlow, Ireland, checked on the elderly man and to their horror found he was dead.

An ambulance crew pronounced him dead at the scene.

The Gardai said it was investigating the circumstances of the ‘unexplained death of an elderly male’ and would scour footage from nearby CCTV cameras. The deceased man has been named locally as Peadar Doyle, who was in his 60s and is believed to have lived in a nearby house which was sealed off by police as a crime scene.

Ken Murnane, the stunned Mayor of Carlow, said: ‘I cannot believe anyone would do something like that.

‘It beggars belief, I’m just shocked. It’s like a Hitchcock movie.’

Fergal Browne, a Fine Gael councillor, said the incident was ‘very upsetting for everyone locally’ and that the deceased man had been a ‘decent guy, very well regarded and liked and caused no offence to anybody’. He added: You couldn’t make up what happened. It’s unreal. You are looking at it as a rational person, but those who did this were not rational.’ Father John Dunphy, a minister called to the post office to say prayers for the dead man, said: ‘I only went there and did my normal routine, I didn’t realise what had happened.

‘The guards just asked me to come up to bless a man who had dropped dead.

‘That’s all I was involved in, that’s all I normally do, just go in and say prayers with them and I left straight away.’

A Gardai spokesman said an investigation into the ‘unexplained’ death of the elderly man was underway and a post mortem would be conducted to establish the cause of death.

No arrests have been made but two men in their 30s have been interviewed.