PH exerting efforts to locate 4 missing Filipinos in Myanmar - DFA

MANILA, April 3 ------ The Philippine Embassy in Yangon is working double-time to locate the four missing Filipinos following last week's magnitude 7.7 earthquake in Myanmar, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said. The four are feared trapped in the 12-story Sky Villa Condominium in Mandalay City, one of the worst disaster sites in the Southeast Asian state.

In an interview, DFA Office of Migration Affairs Director Catherine Alpay said the majority of those retrieved from the Sky Villa since Tuesday were already deceased. “The (embassy team is) doing everything possible to check the cadavers being retrieved – chine-check nila nang mabilisan as much as possible and they're establishing linkages with the Mandalay Hospital and those working with the cremation of the cadavers,” she said.

Alpay said most of the bodies retrieved in Mandalay were already in the advanced stage of decomposition and were cremated due to the lack of facilities and cold storage units. Meanwhile, she said the embassy was able to request local rescuers to extract tissue samples from the deceased persons first and alert them if he or she is identified as a Filipino. “Measures are in place for proper identification when and where possible,” Alpay said.

Despite this, she said the DFA is hoping that the four are still alive. Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Eduardo Jose De Vega said most of the hard-hit areas are under the administration of the military junta but a large part of the country is controlled by various armed and secessionist groups. “They don’t have quite the capabilities, all the equipment, all the things that they needed to undertake a massive operation so that affects the operations,” he said. “Myanmar is not quite capable the way some other ASEAN countries are of handling situations like this. That's why they admit it, they want help.”

PH humanitarian team

A Filipino contingent, composed of nearly 100 doctors and urban search and rescue experts, was earlier sent to Myanmar to assist in the response operations. The DFA said all its members have arrived in the country and have set up their facilities and command center in Naypyidaw. “The first group is at Naypyidaw. The next of kin (of the missing Filipinos), of course, would like them to be in Mandalay but it is not up to us,” De Vega said, noting that the area of deployment depends on the host country. However, he repeated that the embassy team would be in Mandalay to closely monitor the situation.

There are 171 Filipinos in Mandalay, 764 legal Filipino workers across Yangon, and less than 25 in Naypyidaw, another area badly hit by the earthquake. In Mandalay, the DFA said, 128 Filipinos were visually verified safe, 14 were outside Myanmar when the tremors happened, and 25 are up for welfare checks. As of Wednesday, De Vega said, the embassy is facilitating transportation to transfer some Filipinos in Mandalay to a shelter in Yangon.

In the same interview, De Vega also disclosed that 50 to 60 Filipino trafficking victims, suspected to be working in scam hubs in Myanmar, were also about to be repatriated when the earthquake struck. “The best we know is that we have not received, either DFA or the embassy, cries for help from these scamming victims, specifically related to the earthquake,” he said.

Source: pna.gov.ph