The family of Philippine flight attendant Christine Angelica Dacera is demanding extra CCTV material at the hotel, where she was allegedly raped and murdered after a New Year’s Eve party, according to reports.
Surveillance camera clips have already shown the 23-year-old girl in the hallway of the City Garden Grand Hotel, who caught her kissing one of the 11 men with whom she is said to have partyed that night.
Family lawyers, who still believe the Philippine Airlines assistant was raped and murdered, are now looking for all the material, including other angles other than the one already leaked online, the Philippine Daily Inquirer said.
The images so far “don’t tell the whole story,” lawyer Jose Ledda III told ABS-CBN News.
“Our position at the moment is that we have an even deeper understanding of what really happened during those times and that we need to be provided with non-exclusive CCTV footage at that particular angle,” he said, according to the Daily Inquirer report.
Dacera was found unconscious in the empty bathtub of her room in early January 1 and pronounced dead after friends and hotel staff took her to a hospital in Makati City.
Claiming to find physical evidence of rape, Makati City police provisionally charged the 11 men who were with her with rape and homicide.
But prosecutors released three on Wednesday who were later arrested, insisting that police had yet to prove she was raped, let alone that the attack resulted in her death. Early autopsy results said he died of an “aortic aneurysm rupture.”
On Thursday, Brigadier General Vicente Danao Jr., head of the police station in the region of the national capital, admitted that there was not enough evidence to charge them, and blamed the “desire to [local] the police to close the case ”.
“What is important is to establish the cause of death to prevent incidents like these,” he said, according to the Daily Inquirer.
The delay may also mean it’s too late to pick up crucial samples, with the 72-hour “critical time frame” gone, forensic pathologist Dr. Raquel Fortun told CNN Philippines on Thursday.
“If you want to re-examine the body to collect retrospective materials like this, it’s late in the day,” said Fortun, who is not involved in the case.
“What else can you get? You’ve already washed (your body), so you may have already lost material, ”he told CNN.
“And there is a possibility of pollution. Everything the body is exposed to could potentially be left on it. So for me, it’s too late. “