Palace clueless on Gadhafi Filipina maids whereabouts

MANILA, Philippines—Malacañang is clueless as to the whereabouts of four Filipinos who worked as domestic helpers for the family of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi.

A Palace aide  said the Aquino administration was doing its best to locate the four missing Filipino women.

“But we don’t even know the whereabouts of their former leader and family who employed (the Filipino maids),” deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said, referring to the Gadhafi, whose whereabouts are unknown although his wife and a daughter have fled to Algeria as Tripoli fell into the hands of the Libyan rebels.

Valte said relatives of the maids have sought the assistance of the Palace  and it was doing what it could to help track down the four missing women.

“The requests of their relatives have reached us and we are looking at what we can do to find them,” Valte said over government radio station DZRB.

“I still don’t know what we can do to find them and help them to safety,” she added.

Valte said that the Filipino workers who decided to stay in Libya despite the civil war in that country could not be blamed for their decision.

“We understand their situation and what we can do is ensure that they are in a safe place and continue to try to convince them too leave,” Valte said. “This matter continues to crop up but we have no other choice if they do not want to leave.”

On the other hand, Valte admitted that evacuating overseas workers from Syria would be “more tedious” compared to the evacuation from Libya.

“Admittedly, the repatriation of our countrymen from Syria would be more tedious because many of them are domestic workers,” Valte said.

She said that in Libya the Filipinos were mostly skilled workers who were employed by big companies and multinationals that had their own evacuation plans.

But in Syria, Valte said, Filipino diplomats had go to each and every household employing Filipino maids and ask their employers to allow them to leave.

Labor officials earlier said that 90 percent of Filipinos in Syria were undocumented workers and about the same percentage were women working as domestics.

“However, we have also been able to get some of our OFWs evacuated from Syria,” Valte added.