'Maid's hanging a painful trial'

'Maid's hanging a painful trial'

MANILA (AFP): The hanging of a Filipina maid in Singapore has been a "painful trial" for the Philippines, President Fidel Ramos said yesterday, as Manila and Singapore try to resolve the diplomatic row resulting from the death.

Reports here yesterday said a team of Singapore experts would arrive here next week to conduct a joint autopsy on the maid's "victim".

"The past few weeks have been a period of painful trial for our nation's soul," Ramos said in his Easter message to the nation, referring to the emotional uproar in the Philippines caused by the hanging of Flor Contemplacion.

Contemplacion had confessed to murdering a fellow maid, Della Maga and her four-year old Singaporean ward.

Singapore has insisted that Contemplacion, 42, was guilty, but Filipino experts who studied the remains of Maga submitted a report to a special presidential commission suggesting that Maga may have been bludgeoned to death by a man before she was strangled, bolstering Filipinos' belief that Contemplacion was framed.