President Rodrigo Duterte’s eldest sister, Eleanor, says she will file charges against Edgar Matobato, the witness during the Senate hearing who linked the President to the extrajudicial killings in Davao City when he was still a mayor.
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Others were buried at a quarry owned by another member of the Davao Death Squad (DDS), which was made up of policemen and ex-communist rebels.
The self-confessed hitman alleged that in 2007 a suspected kidnapper was fed to crocodiles in the southern province of Davao del Sur.
The senate inquiry is being led by senator Leila de Lima, a vocal critic of Duterte, who in turn the president accuses of taking money from drug traffickers.
Nograles ran twice against Duterte in the 1992 and 1998 mayoral elections, but lost both times.
Mr Matobato also alleged Mr Duterte had ordered the bombing of a mosque in retaliation for an attack on Davao Cathedral in 1993.
“We then cornered him, but it was Mayor Duterte who finished him off. Mayor Duterte arrived to kill Amisola”. Duterte corrected him: it was 1,700, he said.
Residents used to refer to Duterte as CM, standing for city mayor.
Before Duterte became president of the Philippines, he served from 1988 to 1998 as the mayor of Davao City, a metropolis of almost 1.5 million people located in the southern Davao del Sur province.
“Our job was to kill criminals‚ rapists‚ pushers and snatchers”. That’s what we did. “We killed people nearly on a daily basis”, he said.
Chief Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo said in an interview with reporters on Friday, September 16, that the President has apparently taken a stance of silence as the testimony of Edgar Matobato before the Senate committee on justice and human rights the day before is “full of lies”. “I don’t think he is capable of giving those orders”, Andanar said, according to the BBC.
Philippine human rights officials and advocates have previously said potential witnesses refused to testify against Duterte when he was still mayor out of fear of being killed.
Another spokesman, Ernesto Abella, said the allegations needed to be properly investigated.
Wilnor Papa, a campaign officer for the Manila office of Amnesty International, said the problem of impunity was coming to a head partly due to the failure of previous governments, which failed to prosecute Duterte.
Matobato, who claims to be a former member of the “Davao Death Squad” on Thursday faced Senators to reveal his knowledge about the vigilante group.
The UN has repeatedly condemned his policies, as has the Roman Catholic church, the dominant religion in the Philippines, but he has continued to champion a bloody crackdown on drugs.
He said they were taken to the Island Garden City at Samal, where they were killed.
“We’d remove their clothes, burn the bodies and chop them up”, he said.
Victims would be shot or strangled he said, with some disembowelled and dumped into the sea so fish could eat them.
Other victims, he added, included a suspected foreign terrorist, the boyfriend of Duterte’s sister, a radio broadcaster critical of Duterte, and two enemies of Duterte’s son.
Duterte first built a name for his deadly crime-fighting style while serving as Davao’s longtime mayor before becoming president.
Duterte’s son Paolo, now Davao vice mayor, called the testimony “mere hearsay” of “a madman”.
“I’m testing to see if you were brought here to bring down this government”, he said. After his profanity-laced comments about Obama at a recent summit, Duterte called for the withdrawal of USA special forces from the island of Mindanao. The comments were roundly denounced by the United Nations and rights watchdogs.
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Matobato surrendered to authorities in 2009 and had been in a witness protection program until just recently.
