During his testimony, Matobato said he was a member of a “Davao death squad” which had killed hundreds of Duterte opponents and suspected criminals and had even fed a man to a crocodile.
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They’re just some of the shocking allegations made by self-professed hitman Edgar Matobato before a Senate Inquiry into extrajudicial killings in the Philippines Thursday.
Putting his foot down, Senate President Koko Pimentel said yesterday he intends to run the 24-member Senate based on rules.
The senate leadership turned down a request from Leila de Lima, a senator heading the panel looking into Duterte’s drugs war, for Matobato to be taken into protective custody, saying his testimony was not related to the ongoing drugs crackdown.
Matobato recounted a 1993 death squad mission that was unintentionally impeded by the vehicle of an agent of the justice department’s National Bureau of Investigation that was blocking a road on the southern city of Davao.
On September 15, 2016, an admitted former “hit man”, Edgar Matobato, testified at a Philippine Senate hearing about the alleged killings of about 1,000 people in Davao City involving Duterte, who was the city’s mayor for more than two decades.
Matobato said Duterte recruited him around 1988 into the “Lambada Boys”, an assassin squad in Davao that killed more than 1,000 people.
Otherwise, Filipinos may never know if the president was directly responsible for the extra-judicial killings, Adams warned.
The latest controversy concerns Duterte’s time in Davao, a city in the country’s south, where he served as mayor beginning in the late 1980s.
He also said the King family has belied claims by Matobato that a love triangle between King and incumbent Davao City Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte, son of the President, was the motive in the gun attack that took place in 2014 in Davao City.
“Mayor Duterte was the one who finished him off”, he said.
“Now De Lima has gotten into the point of lying because she is scared”, Eleanor said pertaining to the allegations of the Senator’s involvement in drug trades in the New Bilibid Prisons.
“The fact alone that he has been with the witness protection program for…two to three years…he already should have disclosed those allegations a long time ago”, the chief legal counsel said as he questioned the timing of Motabato’s emergence as witness.
Duterte’s promise during his presidential campaign to pursue his antidrug push nationally has alarmed human rights groups, which fear that extrajudicial killings are eroding the rule of law in the Philippines, an important United States ally in Asia.
“I don’t think he is capable of giving those orders”, Andanar said, according to the BBC. About 900 died in police operations and the rest authorities say were “deaths under investigation”, a term human rights activists say is a euphemism for vigilante and extrajudicial killings.
“Our job was to kill criminals like drug pushers, rapists, snatchers”, he said.
“The witness is telling 100 percent lies”, said Duterte’s former running mate, Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, during Thursday’s hearing.
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Wilnor Papa, a campaign officer for the Manila office of Amnesty International, said rampant killings were the outcome of the failure of previous administrations to bring criminal charges against Mr. Duterte. I’ll kill you, ‘ he said, as The Guardian reported.
