Thursday, July 24, 2008 Forensic site at CIP will be off limits even to victims’ families: NBI official
ONCE the mobile morgue is in place next month, the Cebu International Port forensic site for victims of the mv Princess of the Stars sinking will be off-limits to visitors, even to families and relatives of victims.
The move is meant to allow unhampered work when the grim task of identifying the remains of over 800 passengers and crewmembers continues after the vessel is refloated and the rest of the victims are recovered.
The media, though, will be allowed to see the area “for you to have an idea of what it is like,” said Dr. Renato Bautista, National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) medico-legal division chief.
That is why, he said, the International Police (Interpol) wanted the exact date when the vessel will be recovered so it will have an idea when additional personnel should come to Cebu.
Yesterday morning, Bautista visited the site for a scheduled inspection by Transportation Undersecretary Maria Elena Bautista.
The Task Force Frank head, however, failed to show up during the appointed schedule and Dr. Bautista had to leave for an appointment at 2:30 p.m.
But Dr. Bautista said the site will be fenced off using two to three container vans placed over the other.
The NBI and the Interpol, he said, will have their office within the enclosed space where personnel could also rest.
He said the Norwegian company that will provide the morgue will send two to three personnel to set it up.
He hoped that like in Phuket, Thailand where a tsunami struck in 2005, the morgue will have moving stainless steel tables so that six forensic teams involved in identifying the bodies will no longer have to move from one table to the other.
The morgue, Dr. Bautista said, will be for the arriving remains so that those kept at the Cosmopolitan Funeral Homes will stay there.
He said, though, that over a month after the tragedy, they expect to retrieve not bodies but skeletons of victims trapped inside the vessel.
“I think we will be getting just skulls and bones already,” he said.
Last Sunday, 76 more bodies that were believed to be that of victims of the Princess of the Stars sinking arrived in Cebu City.
They were described as already in a “far advanced stage of decomposition,” given the period they were buried or submerged in water.
Bautista described some of them as “close to (being) skeletal.” (RHM)
