THE Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) Davao City Fire District said that nobody has claimed yet on the remains of the body which was found inside the burnt NCCC Mall of Davao in Ma-a nearly months after the fire incident happened on December 23, 2017.
Senior Police Officer 2 Ramil Gillado, the deputy chief of the investigation section of BFP Davao, said the body is now up for autopsy to determine its identity.
Pending any claims, they maintain their record of 38 fatalities during the incident. He said there were only 38 claimants who reported their family went missing during the incident and authorities found these 38 bodies, thus, they stopped their search and retrieval operation when the last body was found.
The location where the body was discovered was at the third floor under the Survey Sampling International (SSI) office, which was located at the fourth floor of the building.
Gillado said they are looking into the possibility that this could be a customer of the mall who went there but they are also not discounting the angle that it might also be the remains of one of the 38 victims or Alexandra Moreno-Castillo, who was the last body that was retrieved.
It was reported that on Wednesday, July 11, the team of the D.M. Consunji, Inc. (DMCI) who were conducting the demolition work at the mall discovered the bones around 5:30 p.m. on the third floor.
Unlike other bodies found in the lobby of SSI that were totally charred, the recently found remains still has clothes on and decomposing flesh since its location is far from where the fire originated.
Gillado, however, is not certain whether the set of bones recovered are complete but he said it has a skull.
It can be recalled that two weeks after the fire gutted down the four-story shopping mall in Maa, the remains of the last missing SSI employee was recovered on January 4 identified as Alexandra Moreno-Castillo, SSI Quality Assurance supervisor. Her body was found at the fourth floor near where the 36 bodies of other victims were also discovered.
Gillado said that during the retrieval of her body, her body parts were incomplete and the only indicator of the family was her key chain.
