President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. questioned on Tuesday the official number of fatalities due to Super Typhoon Yolanda as tallied by the government after the catastrophe.
Speaking to reporters during the 9th commemoration of Super Typhoon Yolanda at the Holy Cross Memorial Gardens, Marcos said that it is unbelievable that only over 6,000 people died when the typhoon struck Eastern Visayas in 2013.
“I have questioned it from day one, 6,000 plus ang sabi nila. It’s not 6,000 plus… It’s too late to determine the actual number,” Marcos told reporters.
As a senator in 2013, Marcos repeatedly expressed doubts about the official death toll during his visits to Tacloban.
“We must come to these commemorations so that we will remember those who were told not to remember. If you remember during the count of the casualties, the count was stopped. And we knew that there were still thousands out there,” Marcos said.
The official Yolanda death count was 6,300 with 5,902 recorded in the Eastern Visayas region.
In this city alone, the official count was over 2,200 but Mayor Alfred Romualdez, the President’s cousin said on Tuesday the number could be as high as 5,000.
“And we knew that there were still thousands out there. And for those thousands, those countless thousands, we come here, we commemorate. Because if we no longer commemorate, their memory dies. And it is only up to us to keep that memory alive,” Marcos added.
Yolanda, the strongest typhoon that ravaged the country with its 315 kilometers per hour winds, whipped up the sea and pushed the storm surge over low-lying coastal areas in Leyte and Samar provinces.
Source: Philippines News Agency
