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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During his testimony, Matobato said he was a member of a “Davao death squad” which had killed hundreds of Duterte opponents and suspected criminals and had even fed a man to a crocodile.
Last week, Duterte virtually blamed Aquino and his allies for their alleged effort to destroy his reputation in the worldwide community following his attacks on US President Barack Obama and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Joseph Franco, a research fellow at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore who has studied the Philippine military establishment, said that allegations about the Davao Death Squad had never been aired so publicly at a high-level Senate hearing. Human-rights groups have demanded investigations and global attention to the murders, saying he’s connected to 1,400 killings as mayor of Davao.
Justice secretary Vitaliano Aguirre also echoed him, calling the allegations “lies and fabrications”.
Rodrigo Duterte has frequently denied involvement in any vigilantism as both mayor and president.
“Our job was to kill criminals like drug pushers, rapists, snatchers”, Matobato said, according to the BBC.
One of the people Paolo Duterte ordered killed was billionaire Richard King in 2014, with whom he was fighting with over a woman, Matobato said.
“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.
“They were killed like chickens”, he told the televised hearing.
“Me? They are saying that I’m part of a death squad?” “We shall see if Matobato’s testimony creates the condition to remove the chilling effect” that Duterte’s “clan” had long exerted on potential witnesses.
Malacañang on Thursday said it will wait for the investigation to end before giving any statements on the ongoing Senate hearing.
A former death squad member has claimed the President of the Philippines ordered his group to murder criminals, Muslims and political opponents during his time as mayor of Davao city.
“We then cornered him, but it was Mayor Duterte who finished him off. Mayor Duterte arrived to kill Amisola”.
The agent ran out of bullets and was wounded in a shootout before Mr Duterte, the Davao mayor at the time, showed up armed with a submachine gun, Mr Matobato said. The president’s son said the allegations were without proof and “are mere hearsay”, telling reporters he would “not dignify the accusations of a mad man”.
He also said Duterte’s anti-narcotics crusade had cut the supply of drugs by 80-90 percent and police were “removing the fear of crime and violence in the hearts of our countrymen”.
That sentiment was echoed by the senator heading the panel looking into Duterte’s drug war, Leila de Lima.
And, in his testimony, he implicated Duterte’s son Paolo, who is now Vice Mayor of Davao.
He said Mr Duterte once even issued an order to kill Ms de Lima, when she chaired the Commission on Human Rights and was investigating the mayor’s possible role in extrajudicial killings in 2009 in Davao.
“Forget the laws on human rights”, he said.
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In the 10 weeks since he assumed the presidency, vigilantes have killed almost 2,000 people, leaving cardboard signs by the corpses that label them drug dealers.
