At the morgue, the wife said it was him, then they buried him - her husband returns to their home in Honduras, four days after the funeral

A 'dead' man has returned four days after his burial, to shock his wife who mistakenly identified a body at the morgue and buried an unknown coronavirus victim in Honduras.

According to foreign media, Telegrafi reports, Victoria Sarmiento spent several days looking for her husband Julio after the 65-year-old failed to return home.

So last Wednesday (December 30) the concerned housewife, from El Carmen, Honduras, took his identity documents to the local hospital, where staff told her he had recently died of the coronavirus.

She is said to have later identified the man's body at the Occidente Hospital mortuary, before it was released for burial.

Ms Sarmiento hired a funeral director to transfer the man's body 30 miles from the hospital to her rural village in the country's western municipality of San Nicolas, Copan, where distraught relatives held a ceremony before his burial.

The woman said she paid 10,500 lempiras (about 350 euros) for the funeral expenses.

Mrs. Sarmiento was still in mourning when, four days later, husband Julio arrived home after being found injured in a field in the neighboring municipality of Trinidad.

He had gone out for a walk, but fell down and could not get up, remaining there for several days without food or drink.

Mrs. Sarmiento told the Honduran LaPrensa newspaper: “That was not my husband who died, because I have my husband here now. I recognized him."

"I would like them to give me back some of what I spent because they gave me the body of someone I didn't know. The authorities at the morgue should have properly examined him to see if it was really him."

The Hospital de Occident confirmed that the unidentified man she buried had arrived at the hospital in a serious condition with Covid-19 on December 27. He died a few hours later.

While the director of the hospital, Juan Carlos Cardona, insisted that it was the woman who mistakenly identified the man as her husband. /Telegraph/