Italian Woman’s Body Still Unclaimed Mataram, Lombok. Police have been attempting to contact the Italian Embassy in Indonesia about an Italian woman who was found dead in a hotel in the Senggigi tourist resort in West Lombok district on April 9, a police spokesman said over the weekend.
The body of the Italian woman, identified as Melanie Pichler, 24, was currently at the morgue of the West Nusa Tenggara Police’s Bhayangkari Hospital in the provincial capital Mataram, Adj. Comr. Indra Lustrianto, chief of the East Lombok Police’s criminal investigation unit, said when contacted from Mataram on Saturday.
Police needed somebody from the Italian embassy in Jakarta or another Italian government representative office, or the woman’s next of kin to take care of the body and give permission for an autopsy, he said.
Pichler was found dead in her bathroom at the Ray Hotel without visible indications that she had died from physical violence. It was believed she had succumbed to an illness because she was found by a hotel employee in the bathroom with part of her body covered in her own
excrement.
However, the police wanted to conduct an autopsy to conclusively establish the cause of her death, Lustrianto said.
“But if we cannot get permission from the Italian authorities or her next of kin, the autopsy cannot take place and the body will remain at the morgue,”’ he said.
According to the local immigration office, all of Pichler’s travel documents were in order and she arrived in West Nusatengara on April 6 from Makassar, South Sulawesi.
Italian Woman's Body Unclaimed 
Tue Apr 14, 2009 9:46 am