Documents relating to Michael Schumacher have been stolen, the Formula One star’s management said, with the thieves claiming them to be medical records about his coma from a devastating ski crash in December.
However, French police have initiated a criminal probe into the alleged theft. “For several days stolen documents and data are being offered for sale. The offeror claims them to be the medical file of Michael Schumacher,” the German’s spokeswoman Sabine Kehm said in a statement. “We cannot judge if these documents are authentic. However, the documents are clearly stolen. The theft has been reported and the authorities are involved,” she added.
Kehm warned against either the purchase or the publication of the data, stressing: “The contents of any medical file are totally private and confidential and must not be made available to the public.” She vowed to sue “against any publication of the content or reference to the medical file.” Schumacher was transferred from a French hospital to a facility in Switzerland earlier this month after emerging from a coma. He had been treated since December 29 in the French Alpine city of Grenoble after he slammed his head against a rock while skiing with his son and friends.
A police source later told AFP that Grenoble hospital had last week filed a lawsuit regarding the theft of the data. The 45-year-old was transferred to a hospital in the Swiss city of lausanne where he will be undergoing further treatment. The racing star underwent two operations to remove life-threatening blood clots after the freak accident that shocked the world, before being plunged into a medically induced coma.
Since then, Kehm had said he was showing short moments of consciousness, but few other details have filtered out and it is still unclear as to what the future holds for the man who cheated death countless times on the track.
Grenoble prosecutor Jean-Yves Coquillat told AFP an investigation was launched on Friday following a complaint from the hospital where Schumacher was treated for months after the December crash. “For now nothing is certain in this case,” he said.
“The perpetrator or perpetrators of the theft contacted some French, Swiss and German journalists. An individual, communicating by email, is asking for 60,000 Swiss francs (49,000 euros, $67,000) to provide a document of several dozen pages that summarises everything that happened at Grenoble during Michael Schumacher’s hospitalisation,” Coquillat said.
He said parts of the document were provided by email to prove it was legitimate. A source close to the investigation said the document appeared to be a summary written by Schumacher’s doctor for his transfer to Switzerland this month after emerging from a coma. Police were tracing who had access to the document and the hospital was checking its computer system to see if it may have been hacked, sources said.