Mr Duterte has alleged that Ms de Lima, who opposes his brutal crackdown on drug dealers and users, employed a driver who took money from drug barons.
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Duterte made the statement after meeting the Norwegian captive freed by the Abu Sayyaf terror and kidnap group in Davao City.
“Mayor Duterte was the one who finished him off. Jamisola (the justice department official) was still alive when he (Duterte) arrived”.
He said he had gone from a witness protection programme into hiding because he feared for his life.
“The Duterte administration is committed to a platform of a peaceful, crime-free, corruption-free nation that is not affected by any controversy”, presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said.
After a 1993 bombing of a Roman Catholic cathedral in Davao city, Matobato said Duterte ordered him and his colleagues to launch attacks on mosques in an apparent retaliation.
Duterte has rejected the criticisms, questioning the right of the United Nations, the USA and Obama to raise human rights issues, when US forces, for example, had massacred Muslims in the country’s south in the early 1900s as part of a pacification campaign.
A 2012 investigation by the Commission on Human Rights found that from 2005 until 2009, “there was a systematic practice of extrajudicial killings, which can be attributed or attributable to a vigilante group or groups dubbed in the media as the Davao Death Squad”.
An worldwide human rights watchdog wants an independent investigation into allegations that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte was directly involved in extrajudicial killings.
Early this month Duterte said “plenty will be killed until the last pusher is out of the streets”. Duterte’s spokesman said the allegations had already been investigated without charges being filed while his son, Paolo Duterte, called the testimony “mere hearsay” of “a madman”.
“There is no sane reason for not telling all these things before when President Duterte was still the Mayor [of Davao City.]”, Panelo said. “Those were the people we killed every day”.
While acknowledging that protective custody for witnesses is not covered by the Senate’s rules, she said “this is a long-standing practice, probably in any legislative body in the world, because it is an ancillary and inherent power of the legislature to support its mandate of conducting inquiries in aid of legislation”.
Matobato’s testimony set off a tense exchange between pro-Duterte and opposition senators.
“Ang tinitira niya ngayon ay ang pamilya, nagkamali siya, dapat tirahin niya yung politiko dahil hindi kami politiko (He should go after the politicians, Jocelyn and I are not politicians)”, she said.
“I’m testing to see if you were brought here to bring down this government”, Cayetano said.
Another senator, former national police chief Panfilo Lacson, warned Matobato that his admissions that he was involved in killings could land him in jail.
De Lima before withdrawing the request said that she would ask a lawyer to handle the taking of Matobato’s accounts and convert it into a judicial affidavit for future proceedings before the request for custody is formalized. “You have no immunity”.
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Cayetano suggested that the alleged hitman had been coached by De Lima regarding what to say at the hearing.
