Diego Maradona’s doctor has tearfully denied any wrongdoing in his care of the late footballing icon as the police investigation into his death continues.
Leopoldo Luque is being probed over medical negligence and police are treating the footballer’s death as a possible culpable homicide.
But in his first media interview since police raided his home earlier today, the doctor has said ‘someone is trying to find a scapegoat’ where there isn’t one.
Police raided the home of the personal physician Luque on Sunday and investigators are looking into all the medical staff involved with his care.
Luque was at his home while the search on the outskirts of Buenos Aires took place, while Argentinian TV stations have been broadcasting live images of police entering his clinic.
The searches were ordered after Maradona’s daughters Dalma and Giannina gave statements yesterday and questioned whether the medication their father was receiving was appropriate.
Argentinian media are reporting Luque could be questioned as an ‘imputado’, someone who is under official investigation on suspicion of possible mala praxis or negligence.
The physician mounted an emotional defence of his treatment of the soccer legend after the police search of his home.
Luque broke down in tears as he insisted he had done everything possible to assist the retired footballer in his first interview since investigators launched their shock operation to try to establish whether Maradona had been the victim of medical negligence.
Tears rolled down his cheeks as he insisted in a hastily-arranged press conference at his home near Buenos Aires which lasted nearly 40 minutes a ‘friend’ had died and Diego was his own worst enemy when it came to accepting help from professionals
‘I don’t see good and bad people in all this. We all did what we could. But Diego was the most difficult one of them.
‘You couldn’t do anything if Diego didn’t want it. He hated doctors and psychologists. With me it was different because I was honest with him. He was my friend.
‘He should have gone to a centre of rehabilitation when he left hospital but he didn’t want to.
‘If I’m responsible for anything when it comes to Diego, it was loving him and improving his life.’
Maradona’s lawyer Matias Morla last week demanded a top-level probe into the emergency response to the retired footballer’s death.
Morla said the first ambulance took more than half an hour to reach the rented house north of Buenos Aires where the former Naples and Barcelona star suffered heart failure.
He called the delay a ‘criminal idiocy’ and complained Maradona had not received any medical checks in the 12 hours before he died.