Matobato said he received orders to kill either directly from Duterte or from active-duty Davao police officers assigned to the mayor’s office who were also part of the death squad.
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Other victims were a suspected foreign terrorist, who Matobato said he strangled then chopped into pieces and buried in a quarry in 2002. His anti-drug campaign, which he started after becoming the president in July this year, has already left more than 3,000 suspected drug dealers and users dead, according to The Guardian.
Edgar Matobato, a former militiaman, made the allegations against Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte during a Senate committee hearing on Thursday.
He said the death squad was blocked by the vehicle of an NBI agent and a confrontation led to a shootout, leaving the agent wounded and out of bullets.
“Mayor Duterte was the one who finished him off. Jamisola (the justice department official) was still alive when he (Duterte) arrived”.
Meanwhile, the Manila Times reported that President Rodrigo Duterte said the Philippines is considering buying military equipment from China and Russian Federation, vowing to modernize the Armed Forces to improve its capability to address insurgency and terrorism.
The killings he said he has knowledge of happened starting in 1988, when Duterte first became mayor, to 2013, when he expressed his desire to leave the death squad, prompting his colleagues to implicate him criminally in one killing.
“We were tasked to kill criminals like drug dealers, rapists, [purse] snatchers”. That’s what we did.
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said Tuesday that his country will no longer participate in joint patrols with the United States in the South China Sea, describing such patrols as “a hostile act”.
“I think that is a malicious accusation.Statements like that should be supported by evidences, otherwise it is only an accusation or rumors”, he told reporters during the I-speak media conference on Thursday, September 15.
Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella also encouraged the public to stay calm and objective, saying it was prudent to wait for the proper investigation into the matter.
“Whatever testimonies, statements that the chairperson (of the Senate committee) are saying, we will have to have a proper investigation regarding that”.
In another instance, Matobato said his group kidnapped and killed a man named Salik Makdum in 2002, on Duterte’s orders, local news networks reported.
Matobato accused Paolo Duterte, Duterte’s son and the current vice mayor of Davao City, of being a drug addict and ordering at least one death, Reuters reports.
They were killed by the Davao Death Squad, he said.
“We were told about it inside the office”. She said she saw the testimony as a step toward truth and justice for victims of the president’s alleged purges, past and present.
Matobato also said it was Vice Mayor Paolo Duterte, son of the President, who ordered the killing of the businessman Richard King in 2014 over a woman. “I will not dignify with an answer the accusations of a madman”. She’s joined by several global organizations, including the United Nations and human rights watchdogs, in criticizing the wave of extrajudicial killings.
The hearing’s chair, Senator Leila de Lima, is a longtime critic of Duterte’s human rights record.
Salgado said he was amused by the unintentionally comic interaction between Trillanes and Cayetano at the hearing.
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Matobato said he left the witness protection scheme and went into hiding when Duterte became president, fearing for his life.
