A Filipino former militiaman testified before the country’s Senate on Thursday that President Rodrigo Duterte, when he was still a city mayor, ordered him and other members of a liquidation squad to kill criminals and opponents in gangland-style assaults that left about 1,000 dead.
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The committee meeting was released by the office of Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez just hours after the Senate conducted an inquiry on extrajudicial killings which heard the testimony of self-confessed Davao Death Squad (DDS) hitman Edgar Matobato.
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.
Duterte, who took office more than two months ago, won May elections in a landslide on a promise to kill thousands of criminals.
He left the protection programme when Mr Duterte became president, fearing he would be killed.
The existence of the “Davao Death Squads” has never been proven, but the term is familiar in the Philippines and has played a part in Duterte’s meteoric rise to the presidency as a no-nonsense crimebuster.
For their part, Mr. Nograles and his son, incumbent congressman Karlo Alexei B. Nograles, said they were not aware of any supporters killed.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has been accused of killing a justice department agent with an Uzi submachine gun while serving as Mayor of Davao.
He later retracted that statement in a press conference, telling reporters there were “no Davao death squads”, but the allegations remain and numerous local and worldwide human rights groups have repeatedly criticized his record.
FOLLOWING the Senate investigation into the alleged extrajudicial killings by the Davao Death Squad on Thursday, another spectacle is underway at the House of Representatives.
“Our job was to kill criminals like drug pushers, rapists, snatchers”.
He said he and others were waiting to ambush her but she did not go to a part of a hilly area – a suspected mass grave – where they were waiting to open fire.
He described in gruesome detail their killing methods. Its members consisted of former rebels and police.
Mr Matobato alleged that an additional pair were enemies of Mr Duterte’s son Paolo, who is now vice mayor of Davao City.
“A few days later, he ordered that we arrest and kill Muslim suspects, so we were staking out the Muslims”, Matobato testified.
“The people of Davao were being slaughtered like chicken”, he said, adding he lied to his wife about butchering chickens when she saw his blood-spattered shirts. But the killing was not carried out.
He said that prompted his colleagues to implicate him criminally in one killing to silence him. The two gunmen were also later killed, again supposedly on the Vice-Mayor’s orders.
Matobato said the victims in Davao allegedly ranged from petty criminals to people associated with Duterte’s political opponents, and included a wealthy businessman who was killed in central Cebu province allegedly because of a feud with Duterte’s son over a woman.
Little is known about Matobato, who volunteered to give testimony in a senate investigation led by Leila de Lima, a former justice minister who has denounced Duterte’s crackdown. They are mere hearsay.
Matobao told the committee he quit the death squad in 2013 and was tortured and threatened to keep quiet about the killings.
Matobato was previously under the Justice Department’s Witness Protection Program (WPP) since 2014 when De Lima was still justice secretary.
The war on drugs has driven prisons to breaking point.
“Whatever testimonies, statements that the chairperson (of the Senate committee) are saying, we will have to have a proper investigation regarding that”.
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He added that the police “follow the rule of law” and that there was no shoot-to-kill order despite the growing toll of bodies piling up in the wake of Duterte’s crackdown.
