BATAC, Philippines The lights went out on former president Ferdinand Marcos yesterday after a Philippine power firm cut the electricity to a mausoleum where his corpse is lying in a glass coffin.
"This is the ultimate harassment, the harassment of the dead, the dead who cannot speak up to defend himself," said the former first lady, Mrs Imelda Marcos.
Workers of the Ilocos Norte Electric Co-operative pulled the plug on the family compound in the northern Philippine town of Batac, Marcos's hometown, after the family failed to pay bills totalling £136,000, Co-operative officials said.
The corpse of the man who ruled the Philippines for 20 years until he was overthrown in 1986 has lain in an elevated glass coffin in the air conditioned crypt since its return to the country in 1993. Preserved by chemical injections, the cadaver had been lit by soft, eerie lights 24 hours a day and surrounded by the strains of classical music in the background.