The 2020 death of the iconic soccer great shook Argentina and fans around the world.
The homicide case against Diego Maradona’s medical team has been declared a mistrial, lawyers for the defendants said, in a case that transfixed Argentina following the football great and national hero’s 2020 death.
The date for the new trial was not initially announced on Thursday and new judges were not yet nominated. The decision came after one of three judges in the case, Judge Julieta Makintach, resigned on Tuesday in the face of allegations of an ethical breach.
Maradona, who almost single-handedly led the Argentine team to World Cup victory in 1986 in Mexico, died from heart failure while he was recovering from surgery for a haematoma that formed between his skull and brain. He was 60.
His death shook the nation, and he was mourned across the world, acutely in Italy’s Naples, where he had elevated the southern city’s scorned team Napoli in the mid- to late 1980s to huge success with domestic and European glory.
Lauded as one of the greatest and most iconic players to ever grace a football pitch, Maradona struggled with drug addiction for many years and with connections to the Naples underworld in his time there.
His performance in the 1986 World Cup tournament has since become sporting legend. He dubbed his controversial first goal in a quarterfinal the “Hand of God”, since it led to an Argentinian victory over England – a rival with whom the country only four years previously had fought a war over the Falklands Islands, known as the Islas Malvinas in Spanish.
But Maradona’s second goal in that match, which saw him shimmy past several England opponents from his own half to score the decisive second, was sublime.
In 2000, the football governing body Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) named Maradona one of its two “Players of the Century”, alongside Brazil’s Pele.
Seven members of his medical team were charged with negligent homicide in a trial that began on March 11. The defendants have denied the charges of “simple homicide with eventual intent” in Maradona’s treatment. They were facing prison sentences of between eight and 25 years.
Video had surfaced of the judge, Makintach, that showed her apparently being interviewed by a camera crew as part of a documentary in the corridors of the Buenos Aires courthouse and in her office, which breached judicial rules.