Philippine officials in Saudi Arabia will ask the Saudi government to send home “for humanitarian considerations” a 35-year-old Filipino woman who was jailed for alleged immoral acts.
Labor Attaché David Des Dicang assured the family of Camille (not her real name) that the government is doing its best to help her.
“We assure you that we’re doing our very best to assist all our compatriots who run afoul with local laws,” Dicang said in an article posted on Saudi-based Arab News.
Camille, a mother of three from Quezon City, has been in jail since August last year after her employer turned her over to authorities because she got pregnant out of wedlock by a co-worker. She, however, claimed she was raped by her co-worker, a Bangladeshi identified only as Mammon.
Camille was working as a janitress in a dental clinic in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, a job she started in May 2009. She found out she was pregnant in September, and on December she had a miscarriage.
Paul Saret, vice consul of the Philippine Embassy in Riyadh, said they could not push for the woman’s immediate release since her case is still under investigation by the Investigation and Prosecution Commission.
Saret added that speculation that the woman faces 100 lashes as punishment is premature, as the case is still with the prosecutor’s office.
According to the article in Arab News, Camille initially claimed she was gang-raped, but police said she told investigators that she was raped by only one person, 27-year-old Mammon, also a janitor in the same dental clinic in Hafr Al-Baten.
Saret and Dicang said the Saudi police view the issue as a moral crime and not rape.
The report also said police were also looking into reports that the woman had an affair with two other men — another expatriate and a fellow Filipino.
“That’s why the police were disappointed when the woman suffered a miscarriage. They were eager to find out who among the three was the father of the baby,” the article quoted a community member familiar with the case as saying.
Saret and Dicang refused to delve into details in the report, saying the woman’s status, as a “family woman,” should be taken into consideration.
An earlier report by the Middle East chapter of migrants’ rights group Migrante International, however, quoted the clinic’s owner and Camille’s coworkers, who are also Filipinos, as saying that no rape happened, and that she was having an affair with the suspect.
The suspect also admitted to engaging in sexual intercourse with Camille three times before she got pregnant, the clinic’s owner added.
Camille, however, said in the Migrante report that the suspect made her drink tea morning of August 9 last year which she suspected to be drugged. She woke up in the hallway with her clothes already soiled, she said.
“Ni-rape po ako, at hindi ko po kagustuhan iyon (I was raped, and it was something I didn’t consent to),” Camille was quoted as saying in the report, adding that the suspect even apologized for raping her and promised her marriage. – KBK, GMANews.TV
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