Thirteen people including a funeral director have been arrested in Tuscany for allegedly operating a crematorium scam in which bodies were stored with the corpses of cats and dogs and burned "ten or twenty at a time".

The arrests follow an investigation that began last year when police learned that crosses and handles from coffins used at the crematorium at Massa Carrara were being sold for re-use. They then discovered that the bodies were being piled up for mass burning.

Those arrested include the funeral director, employees of the local council, and a retired officer in the Carabinieri, Italy's paramilitary police force. They are accused of fraud, fake cremations, "forming a criminal organisation" and "violating the piety of the dead". Each faces up to seven years in prison.

"Tearful mourners who thought they were being handed the ashes of their beloved relatives were in fact receiving ashes which could have come from anyone," said La Stampa . The Massa council had not carried out cremations itself but had given the contract to a local funeral firm.

Bodies were stacked in cemetery storerooms together with the remains of animals. The ashes of an estimated five hundred bodies were found in one underground store. "To cremate a body costs money," a police spokesman said. "Obviously you make more money if you burn them en masse rather than individually."

Giovanni De Luna, professor of modern history at Turin University, said that the scandal would reinforce traditional Roman Catholic doubts about cremation. Although the first crematorium in Italy was constructed in Milan in 1876, cremation was forbidden by the Church for centuries because of the belief that the body is "the temple of the Holy Spirit" and that Christians will be bodily resurrected.

The Second Vatican Council lifted the ban in 1963, provided that the body was "present during the funeral" and cremated afterwards. Church rules were relaxed further in 1997 when the Vatican agreed that cremated remains could be brought into church for the liturgical rites of burial.

However many priests still prefer to conduct funeral rites with the body present and some remain opposed to cremation altogether on the grounds that it is pagan. Professor De Luna said that although the number of cremations had risen in the past 20 years from 3,650 a year to 56,000, only 10 per cent of bodies were cremated.

In January this year Italian Bishops ruled that believers who choose to have their ashes scattered after being cremated are entitled to a Christian funeral. This followed the refusal of a parish priest in the Italian Alps to hold a funeral for a local man who had asked to have his remains spread in the mountains.

The priest at St Etienne in Aosta told the man's widow that a religious funeral was impossible because it was against the dogma of the resurrection of the body. However Bishop Luciano Pacomio, head of doctrine at the Italian Bishops Conference, said that this reflected an "out-of-date mentality".

Last year Italian bishops issued new funeral rites which, for the first time, included specific prayers in the presence of ashes rather than a body, and even prayers to be read at a crematorium.

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