A man has been arrested for removing his mother’s body from her grave at a cemetery and driving her coffin home.

He later told a judge that he wanted to check she was really gone because her death three days earlier had occurred so suddenly.

Witnesses of the bizarre incident said the dead woman’s son marched up to the funeral niche where she had been laid at a cemetery in Aviles in northern Spain while yelling she’d been taken from her home “without permission”.

He then smashed a partition protecting the coffin and dragged it to his car, they claimed.

Shocked onlookers said he even asked them for help before he lifted it into the vehicle’s boot.

Police later found him and his dead mother, who was still in her casket, at his property. They arrested him before returning the coffin to the cemetery.

The son was released by the judge but was warned he could be charged with grave desecration.