The embassy has contacted the morgue where Marilyn Eroy Ibañez’s body was stored after she was found dead at her employer’s house, said Ambassador Ezzedin H. Tago.
“We've sought an explanation from the morgue and concerned Saudi authorities who conducted the autopsy on Marilyn's body,” Tago told Arab News.
He added that on the advice of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), the Philippine Embassy had hired a Saudi law firm in Alkhobar to handle the case.
The relatives complained that the woman's tongue and one of the eyes were missing when they received the body.
Philippine Sen. Manny Villar had eventually asked the DFA to find out why it had taken a long time for the remains to be repatriated and why the body appeared mutilated.
Tago said that it had taken almost a year before the remains could be repatriated due to the reinvestigation, which the embassy sought after her relatives claimed there was foul play in Ibañez’s death. During the reinvestigation, the body was kept at a hospital morgue in Dammam.
A source told Arab News that the embassy dispatched a team to the Eastern Province to see hospital officials and the coroner who had initially conducted the autopsy and were told that the body was intact when it was first examined.
He did not confirm if it was still intact when it was finally repatriated, but if one of the eyes and tongue were missing when it was received by the family, it could be because the body was already in a state of decomposition.
Ibañez was found unconscious and wounded in the kitchen of her employer in Alkhobar and was rushed to King Fahd Hospital by the Red Crescent on Sept. 8, 2010. She died later at the hospital.
In a report to the DFA main office in Manila, the embassy said that an initial investigation showed that Ibañez had knife wounds in her neck, abdomen and wrist as well as acid burns in her mouth area, arms and legs.
The DFA eventually asked the Philippine Overseas Employment Authority to suspend the license of the Philippine agency, PRA Solidworks Manpower Resources & Promotion, which recruited Ibañez.
Ibañez, who hailed from North Cotabato province in southern Philippines, arrived in the Kingdom on May 31, 2010, which means that she had been working for only four months when she died. She was supposed to work as a nursing aide at a polyclinic but ended up being a housemaid. She was a college graduate.
“The agency must have circumvented the law to be able to deploy her abroad. Romilyn was only 22 years old when she was recruited, which is illegal. Under the law, she must have at least been 23 years old,” then Labor Attaché Des T. Dicang, who has been reassigned to Kuwait, told GMANewsTV.
