Duterte himself has variously denied and confirmed that he was responsible for the squads, and even that he has personally killed criminals.
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President Rodrigo Duterte’s eldest sister, Eleanor, says she will file charges against Edgar Matobato, the witness during the Senate hearing who linked the President to the extrajudicial killings in Davao City when he was still a mayor.
More than 3,500 people, or about 47 per day, have been killed in the past 10 weeks, some 58 percent by unknown assailants and the rest in legitimate police operations, according to police. Duterte initially seemed to urge the killers on, but has more recently tried to distance himself from extra-judicial killings and summary executions.
Duterte’s office denies the claims.
However, presidential spokesperson Martin Andanar rejected Matobato’s accusation. “True, that’s true”, he said in a combination of English and Visayan, a language spoken in Southern Philippines.
Human-rights groups have demanded investigations and global attention to the murders, saying he’s connected to 1,400 killings as mayor of Davao. Rodrigo Duterte, the Davao mayor at the time, then arrived on the scene, Matobato said.
He explained that his only job was to kill criminals, as well as anyone who got in the mayor’s way.
Matobato also said that following the 1993 explosion that killed six people in Davao City’s main Catholic church, the St Peter Cathedral, Duterte ordered a hit on a mosque in the city.
He described in gruesome detail their killing methods.
Leabres says they are trying to make do with the limited resources and ensure proper treatment for all the patients they hope will be reintegrated into society after a year in rehabilitation.
Aside from filing a case against Matobato, Eleanor said that she might start collecting signatures to impeach three government officials which she didn’t name. 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. The four, Mr. Matobato said, were taken to Samal where they were strangled and their abdomens cut open, their bodies thereafter stuffed with hollow blocks before they were thrown out at sea. But the killing was not carried out. Another was a radio commentator, Jun Pala, who was critical of Mr Duterte and was killed by motorcycle-riding gunmen while walking home in 2003.
During a television interview this spring, as Michael Sullivan reported for NPR, a TV host asked then-candidate Duterte about the 700 people allegedly killed during his time as mayor.
Matobato said Duterte had once even issued an order to kill 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.
“People are like chickens in Davao”, Matobato said. Duterte’s son, Paolo Duterte, who is vice mayor of Davao, said the man’s claims were “all based on hearsays”.
Matobao told the committee he quit the death squad in 2013 and was tortured and threatened to keep quiet about the killings.
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.
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De Lima – who has been extremely vocal in criticizing Duterte’s controversial war on illegal drugs – has been accused, meanwhile, of collecting money from drug personalities through an alleged lover to support her senatorial bid in last May elections.
