In a note sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the embassy condemned the alleged beating of Maligaya inside his cell.
“Maligaya was just a suspect who should be treated as such until proven otherwise. In this connection, he should not have been subjected to torture,” John Leonard Monterona, Migrante-Middle East regional coordinator, told Arab News on Wednesday.
Maligaya was implicated in the death of a fellow Filipino driver Andy Miclat Dimacali in July 2010 based on the initial finding that his text message appeared on the mobile phone of the victim on the day that he was found dead.
“However, the text message was the usual communication between friends. There was nothing to indicate a threat, or similar to it, on the part of Maligaya,” Monterona said.
The death notification issued by the Saudi Ministry of Health on July 20, 2010, stated that Dimacali “died outside the hospital with wounds in the head, cracked ribs and was bleeding from the nose.”
Monterona said his group believes Maligaya is innocent. “We at Migrante-Middle East believe that there was foul play,” he said.
He added that such belief was bolstered by the fact that the content of the police report on Dimacali's death was not made public by the police and the prosecutor's office “because it was confidential.”
“If the facts and information gathered by Migrante-Middle East were to be analyzed and studied, it could be inferred that something was wrong that needed to be kept secret from the victim's family,” he added without elaborating.
Dimacali's family is still waiting for the repatriation of his remains.
