A team from the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) is traveling to the earthquake-stricken parts of Myanmar to assist in the identification of fatalities and help locate the four still-missing Filipino nationals.
The Philippine Embassy in Yangon said experts of the NBI Disaster Victim Identification Division (NBI-DVID) would arrive in Mandalay, one of Myanmar’s worst disaster sites, on Saturday to secure tissue samples collected from unidentified remains recovered from the Sky Villa site.
Four Filipinos who remain unaccounted for are feared trapped under the rubble of the Sky Villa Condominium that was pancaked after a 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit the Southeast Asia state last week.
The embassy said the NBI-DVID in Manila would also collect samples from the family members of the missing Filipinos “to ascertain indubitable identity.”
Earlier, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) 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.
However, the embassy was able to request local rescuers to extract tissue samples from the deceased persons first and alert them if they were identified as Filipinos.
According to the Office of Civil Defense (OCD), the urban search and rescue teams from Myanmar, Vietnam, Russia, and China have been assigned to the Sky Villa site.
