The body of a boy was dug up in this city almost five months after super typhoon “Yolanda” devastated the Eastern Visayas region, but the authorities just left the boy’s cadaver in a body bag literally hanging from a tree branch for two weeks.
The body was found in San Jose district’s Barangay Cogon by a canine search team on March 11 in a shallow grave near an old chapel.
Barangay Cogon residents said no one in the village could identify the boy so he could not have been a resident of the barangay, but residents decided to temporarily bury the boy in the grounds of the village’s chapel.
Under current arrangements, bodies of Yolanda fatalities are usually sought with canine teams and dug up by a search team. Crime scene investigators will then take photographs and DNA samples from the cadaver for possible identification.
After processing, the Bureau of Fire Protection is supposed to retrieve bodies for burial at one of the mass grave sites in the city.
But in the case of the body dug up in Barangay Cogon, the BFP never came for the body although village leaders repeatedly told them over a period of two weeks about the body abandoned in their barangay.
“The stench of the corpse that they dug up was already horrid and everyone could smell it because they hung it on a fallen tree by the road side,” one resident said in the vernacular after asking not to be identified.
“Residents are already afraid of catching disease so we are pleading with the authorities to please get the corpse,” the resident added.
Village chief Arlie Go-Perez said she repeatedly told the BFP about the body and it took them two weeks to return and get the body.
When asked about the incident, the local police’s crime scene investigators disavowed knowledge of the body that was dug up last March 11 and they claimed that that was the first time they heard about the matter.
Later in the day, however, the authorities finally retrieved the body and buried it in a mass grave in Barangay Suhi.
The incident has become common in the city, where 2,669 are known to have died, excluding the deaths from nearby towns and provinces. More than half of the Tacloban number come from the San Jose district.
The government’s confirmed death toll is at 6,268 with 1,785 still missing, but the data has not been updated for a month and information on the dead or the missing cannot be found on the website of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council.
The NDRRMC could not explain why the fatality figure has not been updated, although its spokesman Reynaldo Balido confirmed that bodies were still being found in Tacloban four months after the diaster.
“Sometimes they find two or three a day, then there are days where they find none,” Balido earlier told a news wire agency.
United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs herself was shocked that bodies were still turning up when she visited the city last month.
Tuesday 25 March 2014
http://manilastandardtoday.com/2014/03/25/storm-victim-s-body-left-to-rot-on-a-tree/
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