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HONG KONG ? Three coffins with the bodies of Hong Kong tourists killed in a Philippine hostage crisis last week were mis-labelled, a government spokesman said Thursday.
One victim's family went to a Hong Kong morgue to identify their dead relative only to find that the body inside the coffin was a different victim of the tourist bus hijacking that left eight Hong Kong citizens dead.
"Three of the coffins were wrongly labelled," a government spokesman told Agence France-Presse.
"When the bodies were at the mortuary in Hong Kong, the error was discovered."
The mis-labelling happened at a Manila funeral home before the bodies were flown back to the southern Chinese city, the spokesman said, adding that the error likely occurred when they were transferred from plain coffins to more elaborate caskets.
The hostage ordeal on August 23 began when sacked policeman Rolando Mendoza hijacked a bus with 22 Hong Kong tourists and three Filipinos on board in the heart of Manila.
The day-long drama was played out on television screens around the world and ended with a hail of gunfire in a botched rescue attempt riddled with police errors.
Eight Hong Kong tourists were killed in the incident, triggering a public outrage over the mishandling of the crisis and investigations over whether the hostages were killed by Mendoza or by police weapons.
The Philippine government has admitted to making a number of errors in its handling of the crisis, which chilled diplomatic ties with Hong Kong and damaged the Southeast Asian nation's tourism industry.
