Snatched off the street in Logan, Queensland on her way to work at McDonald’s.
A pregnant Filipina has been raped and killed by a still unidentified man in Logan Central, a suburb of Logan City in Queensland, Australia.
“My wife was eight weeks pregnant at the time she was taken,” Cory Ryther, husband of Joan Canino-Ryther, said in between sobs as he joined detectives at Logan police station on May 27. “I’d like to urge the public that anything they knew, anything … to come forward to get this guy.”
Quoted by the couriermail.com.au in a news report on Monday, he added: “Her family, my family, we want justice for my Joan.”
The article quoted the police as saying that Joan was sexually assaulted and suffered a blow to the head that brought her demise. It added that she must have been snatched off the street while walking to McDonald’s at Logan Central, where she worked, on May 21.
A local resident found her almost naked body at 7am the following day, Wednesday, in a yard on Leichhardt Street, about 900 metres away from her home on Mayes Avenue.
Police said they located on May 27 a man who went to a home on Mayes Avenue and asked to be let inside on the night Joan was murdered. But the man, described as wearing a yellow top on the night the crime was committed, has already been released.
Ryther, a Canadian-born chef, said his wife worked eight hours a day at McDonald’s and went to school in the daytime, a schedule she had maintained the past three years.
“Joan was a very determined woman,” he said. “She was the only one out of her brothers and sisters who finished their education.” Joan was the youngest in a brood of eight, he added.
“Nothing would stop her from doing what she wanted to do,” he said, revealing that Joan had wanted so much to be of help to her family back home, especially her brother who became the breadwinner when their father got murdered just before she was born. “In turn she promised her nephews she would put them through school.”
Armed with an ultrasound image of his unborn child, Ryther told the media in Logan Central that his wife had set up a Facebook page for the child, a girl, whom they had named Camille Gayle.
“What was taken from me was not just my wife but was also my child,” Ryther said.
Ryther and Joan got married in October 2011 in the Philippines, after meeting at Stones Corner, in Logan, while he was getting a coffee and she was on a lunch break from studying hairdressing in February 2011.
Anti-narcotics officials from Saudi Arabia are in Manila meeting with their counterparts to forge closer ties between the kingdom and the Philippines in their fight against drug trafficking.
Saudi Arabia, host to the largest number of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) at over 1.5 million, considers drug trafficking a heinous crime punishable by beheading.
“We are returning the favour,” Undersecretary Arturo Cacdac Jr, chairman of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA), who recently visited Riyadh, told reporters on Monday.
Composed of officials from Saudi Arabia’s General Directorate for Drug Control, the kingdom’s delegation, headed by Major General Othman Nasser Al Mhrij, on Monday paid a courtesy call to Cacdac as part of their programme to build stronger bilateral ties against illegal drugs.
The delegation’s visit to the PDEA national headquarters in Metro Manila’s Quezon City, Cacdac said, “served as an avenue” for the Philippines “to showcase its operational capabilities in and facilities for dealing with crimes related to illegal drugs.
Cacdac, who spoke on May 1 at the “2nd Regional Symposium on Narcotics Control and Information Exchange” in Riyadh, said: “The symposium was an excellent opportunity to open lines of communication, share operational experiences and knowledge about international drug syndicates and the best possible practices in combatting them.”
AP
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