Filipino maid gets 10 years in jail for killing friend

Singapore: A Philippine maid in Singapore was sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing and dismembering a friend who was also a maid, a newspaper reported yesterday.

Guen Garlejo Aguilar, 29, faced life imprisonment after pleading guilty earlier this month to strangling her compatriot, Jane Parangan La Puebla, 26, on September 7 last year in a fight over an unpaid debt.

Supreme Court Justice V.K. Rajah ruled that a life sentence would have been "clearly inappropriate", because Aguilar appeared to have recovered from depression, The Straits Times newspaper said.

Prosecutors had reduced the charge against Aguilar from murder to culpable homicide, meaning she no longer faced Singapore's mandatory death sentence for murder.

The Straits Times said the charges were reduced after she was found to be mentally unstable at the time of the killing.

Grotesque

Aguilar admitted killing La Puebla in a fight over money. She said she dismembered La Puebla's body before dumping her head, arms and legs in a bag near a busy subway station, and her torso in a park.

Rajah said the dismemberment was "grotesque and abominable", but irrelevant to the murder charges and not considered in the sentencing, the newspaper reported.

"However, by choosing to plant the deceased's head and torso in two very public places, her behaviour strikes one as nothing short of incoherent and incomprehensible," it quoted the judge as saying.