The secretary noted further that Ms.de Lima, since the time she headed the human rights commission and investigated Davao’s reputed death squad, had filed no case against Mr. Duterte.
Advertisement
The public should not accept hook, line and sinker the testimony of an alleged member of the Davao Death Squad (DDS) as President Duterte is not capable of ordering summary killings in his home city, Malacañang asserted yesterday.
He told how Duterte had once rushed to the scene when the mayor’s men encountered a government agent.
The spokesperson of the Philippine President denied all the allegations, adding that government investigations when Duterte was the city mayor had come to no conclusion because of lack of evidence. Critics allege Duterte largely achieved that transformation through aggressive use of extrajudicial “death squads”.
“They were killed like chickens”, he said.
The Davao Death Squad was first identified by Human Rights Watch in 2009.
Matobato said the victims in Davao allegedly ranged from petty criminals to people associated with Duterte’s opponents, including a wealthy businessman from central Cebu province who was killed in 2014 by a gunman in his office in Davao city allegedly because of a feud with Duterte’s son over a woman. “These are the kind we killed every day”, Mr Matobato said.
He described in gruesome detail their killing methods.
Edgar Matobato revealed that he was recruited by Duterte as a member of the Lambado Boys in the late 1980s. Its members consisted of former rebels and police.
“A few days later, he ordered that we arrest and kill Muslim suspects, so we were staking out the Muslims”, Matobato testified. Most were cut into pieces and buried in a a quarry. But the killing was not carried out.
Matobato said Duterte ordered the killing of a radio commentator named Juan Pala, who was gunned down in 2003 by men on a motorcycle.
Matobato’s testimony set off a tense exchange between pro-Duterte and opposition senators.
Matobato’s claims, which have not been independently confirmed, linked President Duterte and his son, Paolo Duterte, to a list of crimes worthy of a gangster film.
But he also said they killed personal enemies of the Duterte family between 1988 and 2013.
“I didn’t kill anyone unless ordered by Charlie Mike”, he said, telling Senate it was the death squad’s coded reference to city mayor, referring to then-mayor Duterte.
The hitman said other crimes involved murdering people affiliated with a mosque in Davao after a Roman Catholic church was bombed in 1993.
Duterte had alleged that de Lima’s former driver used to take money from detained drug lords. They are mere hearsay.
“On the other hand, I can also say that it is unfair”.
Matobato said the death squad “tortured” him when he asked to leave the group in 2013, prompting him to surrender to the justice department’s witness protection programme.
The witness, Edgar Matobato, spoke to Filipino lawmakers at Senate hearings investigating a recent wave of extra-judicial killings that has claimed more than 3,000 lives as part of the president’s anti-drug campaign.
Duterte ran for president on the promise he would wage an aggressive war on drugs.
Since his election more than 3,000 drug users and dealers have been killed in in police operations or by vigilantes, according to the authorities, amid global alarm over human rights violations.
Advertisement
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.
