Workers of agency that recruited maid found in bag to take lie detector test
Two employees of the recruitment agency that deployed the 23-year-old overseas Filipino worker whose body was found inside a traveling bag at the airport last week will be subjected to a lie detector test by investigators.
The police identified the two as Agnes Maldiza Asinse and Gelyn Sawaban who both work for Saviormed Manpower Services. Based on the statements they gave to Pasay police probers, it was Asinse who recruited Nidzailyn Bahjin to work as a domestic helper in Oman. Sawaban, on the other hand, said that Asinse had requested her to fetch the victim from the airport after her arrival in the country.
Bahjin’s body was found inside her own traveling bag at the parking area of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 2 on January 11.
A check showed that she had arrived at the airport from Bahrain the day before.
Police investigators questioned the two women after the victim’s parents told them that Asinse had offered to send someone to the airport to fetch their daughter and bring her home to Patikul, Sulu.
“Sawaban claimed that she missed Bahjin’s arrival by a day. She arrived at the airport on the morning of January 11 but the victim had arrived the previous day,” Chief Inspector Joey Goforth, Pasay City police Station Investigation and Detective Management section head, told the Inquirer.
Goforth said that both women told the police they thought that the victim would be arriving on the 11th. It was only later on that they discovered that she had flown in from Bahrain the day before, they added.
According to Goforth, the two women will undergo a polygraph test Friday at Camp Crame to determine if they were telling the truth.
Based on their investigation, the police learned that the victim left the country on October 6 last year to work as a domestic helper in Oman. However, she later asked to be brought back home after she told her parents that she was having difficulty caring for her employers’ five children.
Goforth told the Inquirer that Bahjin was apparently strangled elsewhere and her body was only returned to the airport car park by her killers.
He said that based on the footage taken by closed circuit television cameras at NAIA, the clothing found on the body was different from those the victim had worn when she arrived at the airport.
“She had time to change or the killers had ample time to bother dressing her up in different clothes, something that could not be done at the airport,” Goforth said.
The victim’s shoulder bag was also missing, as well as the rest of her clothes.
He also said that he was sure that the victim had not been taken back to the airport in a taxi cab as he ruled out the possibility that a cab driver, whose taxi Bahjin could have flagged down immediately after her arrival in Manila, was involved in her killing.
“We are sure that there were persons who fetched her from the airport using a privately owned car, which was [also] used to take her back,” he said.
