Six monks in robes chanted emotional hymns to purify the crime scene and to placate the spirits of the victims. -- PHOTO: AFP
MANILA - HONOUR guards stood erect as weeping relatives of eight Hong Kong tourists killed in a hostage crisis in the Philippines on Tuesday visited the site of the bloodbath.
A Hong Kong couple representing the relatives lit incense sticks and joined six monks in an emotional Buddhist ceremony to remember the dead. Food and flower offerings were laid out on a makeshift altar covered with a golden mantle while six monks in robes chanted emotional hymns to purify the crime scene and to placate the spirits of the victims.
Just metres behind the altar, forensics investigators combed through the bullet-riddled wreckage of a tourist bus where their loved ones spent their last hours as captives of a sacked policeman demanding reinstatement. 'It is a sad day for the Philippines. It was a crime that never should have happened,' said Social Welfare Minister Corazon Soliman, who was among top-level officials who joined the ceremony. 'The Filipino people grieve with them.'
Mr Soliman identified the weeping couple as parents of one of the eight victims of Monday's hostage crisis, in which police stormed the bus after negotiators failed to convince the gunman to surrender peacefully. On Tuesday, tourists returned to the site en masse, some to offer their sympathies and some to have their photos taken with the bus in the background.
'It was very scary, and it struck very close to home. As a Filipino, I feel ashamed, so I am here to offer my sympathies,' said Rachel Giron, a sophomore college student carrying a white rose she intended to lay before the altar. 'Hong Kong accepts many of our foreign workers, and this is how they are treated here,' she said.
Fellow students behind her, however, snapped pictures of themselves near the crime scene. 'We want to show we are one with them,' one student said. Mr Soliman said autopsies had been completed for five of the eight victims, but that relatives of the three others did not want the examination done in Manila.
'Some of the relatives who arrived did not want to go here because they do not want to be overwhelmed with emotion,' she said. 'We have stress debriefers helping them now.' She said of the 17 survivors, three were still recovering in hospital. -- AFP
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