Three cemetery workers in Greece’s second-largest city, Thessaloniki, were found innocent of charges of insulting the dead in a case brought by the family of a woman whose bones were missing when a coffin was opened.

That’s a common practice in Greece where cemetery space is limited in cities and families are required to exhume the remains after three years to remove bones, although there have been instances when the bodies aren’t fully decayed by then.

A court said the criminal code no longer declares what the workers were accused of, with no explanation why the bones were missing or if the coffin had been plundered or if there was any negligence.

Typical of the slow roll of Greece’s judicial system, this case took some four years to finally resolve. Families remove bones to ossuaries and exhumations are conducted by cemetery workers in the presence of next of kin, the state-run Athens-Macedonia News Agency (ANA-MPA) said. The woman’s bones were never recovered and her family sued.