Horrified tenants unwittingly drink from corpse-tainted water tank

Via Singapore's Straits Times, a contender for the year's most revolting crime story.

Apartment tenants discovered a dead woman in their rooftop water tank the hard way: their taps poured out foamy, yellowed liquid.

Some drank it and others used it to boil morning soup for their kids before authorities realized a maid had been killed and dumped into the tank. The water wasn't shut off until 11 a.m. Naturally, panic ensued and residents worried they'd fall terribly ill.

The victim was identified as a 30-year-old Indonesian maid and police suspect a maintenance worker carried out the killing.

Her death, far from home and in such a violent fashion, is clearly tragic. But at least the tainted water probably won't make other residents deathly ill, according to a doctor's analysis in the Straits Times.

Police suspect her body was only floating in the tank for a few hours, not reaching the 24-hour mark when serious decomposition raises the risk of contamination. Authorities have already scrubbed the tanks and announced that the water is drinkable — if the tenants aren't too traumatized to drink from the tap.

The weirdness, however, doesn't end there. On the same day in Johor, a neighboring Malaysian province, yet another woman was found dead in an apartment building water tank.

This woman, 19, is believed to have fallen into the tank by accident. And though her cause of death is less worrisome, the tenants will be less comforted by the length of time her body spent in the tank.

Six days.