The family of Filipino flight attendant Christine Angelica Dacera is demanding extra CCTV images of the hotel where she was reportedly raped and killed after a New Year’s party, according to reports.
Surveillance camera clips have already shown the 23-year-old in the hallway of the City Garden Grand Hotel – catching her kissing one of the 11 men she would have celebrated that night with.
The family’s lawyers – who still believe the Philippine Airlines attendant was raped and killed – are now searching for all the images, including angles other than what has already leaked online, said the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
The footage so far “doesn’t tell the whole story,” lawyer Jose Ledda III told ABS-CBN News.
“Our position now is that we have an even deeper understanding of what really happened during those times and that we should receive CCTV images that are not exclusive at that specific angle,” he said, according to the Daily Inquirer report.
Dacera was found unconscious in her empty bathtub in early January 1 and was declared dead after friends and hotel staff rushed her to a hospital in Makati City.
Claiming to find physical evidence of rape, Makati city police provisionally accused all 11 men who were with her of rape and murder.
But prosecutors on Wednesday released three who were later arrested, insisting that the police had not yet proved that she was raped – much less that the attack led to her death. The initial autopsy results revealed that she died of a “ruptured aortic aneurysm”.
On Thursday, the Chief of Police of the National Capital Region, Brigadier General Vicente Danao Jr., admitted that there was insufficient evidence to accuse them, blaming the “eagerness of [local] police to file the case. “
“The important thing is to establish the cause of death to prevent incidents like this,” he said, according to the Daily Inquirer.
The delay could also mean that it is too late to collect crucial samples, with the 72-hour “critical period” already past, forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun told CNN Philippines on Thursday.
“If you are going to reexamine the body to collect materials like this in retrospect, it is too late,” said Fortun, who is not involved in the case.
“What can you still achieve? You already washed (the body), so you may have lost material there, ”she told CNN.
“And there is a possibility of contamination. Everything the body is exposed to, potentially, can be left in it. So, for me, it’s late.