Body of maid found stuffed in freezer flown home

MANILA: The body of a Filipino housemaid found stuffed in a freezer in an abandoned apartment in Kuwait City was flown home to her grieving family yesterday, as attention focused on the plight of millions of mostly poor Filipinos toiling abroad.

As Joanna Daniela Demafelis’s remains were wheeled to the Manila airport’s cargo bay, her sister broke into tears and embraced the casket before being pulled back and consoled. A brother wept quietly, speechless and overwhelmed by emotion.“I hope my sister will be given justice,” Jojit Demafelis said.

Her body was found on February 6 in an apartment that had reportedly been abandoned for more than a year. Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte said it bore torture marks and it appeared she had been strangled.

Her death was the latest overseas tragedy to befall a worker from the Philippines, a major labour exporter with about a 10th of its 100 million people working abroad. The workers have been called the country’s heroes because the income they send home has propped up the country’s economy for decades, accounting for about 10% of annual GDP.

Philippines officials are under increasing pressure to do more to monitor the safety of its worldwide diaspora of mostly housemaids, construc- tion workers and labourers. There are also calls for the government to boost employment and living standards at home, where nearly one in four people live in poverty, so fewer people need to find work abroad.

Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano stood with the Demafelis family at the airport yesterday and said a prayer. “Her death is very tragic but will also be a rallying point for all of the government agencies to be more aggressive abroad in helping OFWs (overseas foreign workers) be protected,” he said.

Duterte has ordered a ban on the deployment of new Filipino workers to Kuwait, where he said some have committed suicide because of abuses.

He said Kuwait had expressed outrage over Demafelis’s death and promised do everything it could to render justice. – AP/African News Agency (ANA)