Edgar Matobato said Thursday that as a member of the so-called Davao Death Squad, “we were tasked to kill criminals every day, including pushers and snatchers”.
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Mr Duterte became mayor of Davao in 1988, and his tough stance saw crime rates plummet, an approach he has vowed to replicate at national level.
Matobato provided explicit details of alleged killings, including one in which a victim was fed to a crocodile.
Matobato said some of the squad’s victims were shot and dumped on Davao streets or buried in three secret pits, while others were disposed of at sea with their stomachs cut open and their bodies tied to concrete blocks. “We killed people nearly on a daily basis”, he said.
In his testimony, Matobato accused Duterte’s son Paolo, the incumbent Davao City vice mayor, as also responsible for the killing of several people especially hotelier Richard King in 2013 due to rivalry over a woman. Matobato said Duterte had personally ordered multiple executions, and in the case of one justice department employee, personally “finished him off” by firing an Uzi.
Philippine human rights officials and advocates have previously said potential witnesses refused to testify against Mr Duterte when he was still mayor out of fear of being killed.
Government officials have forcefully rejected the allegations, with Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre calling the man’s testimony “lies, fabrications and a product of a fertile and a coached imagination”, Reuters reports. Another was a radio commentator, Jun Pala, who was critical of Duterte and was killed by motorcycle-riding gunmen while walking home in 2003.
She said that considering that it is the President who is being accused by the witness, circumstances leave no doubt that Matobato’s security and custody can not be left to any agency of the Executive Branch.
“It’s not true. I’ve been with the NBI for 26 years, and in these long years, I have been conducting myself in such ways that I give everyone his due, perform my job with honesty, objectivity, and fairness”, he said in a text message sent to reporters.
Duterte himself has not commented on the testimony, the AP says.
Rodrigo Duterte was nicknamed “The Punisher” because of his violent rhetoric and alleged links to vigilante gangs but has denied any role in extra-judicial killings.
“I guess, it has affected his political capital already in a sense that some people who may have trusted him in the first place may have second doubts”, she was quoted as saying by news broadcaster ABS-CBN on Saturday.
It said “there is no evidence to support the killings attributed to or attributable to the DDS”.
Mr Matobato also alleged Mr Duterte had ordered the bombing of a mosque in retaliation for an attack on Davao Cathedral in 1993.
The then head of the Commission on Human Rights, Senator Leila de Lima, told the inquiry Mr Matobato had surrendered to the investigatory body in 2009 and had until recently been in a witness protection scheme. “They are just ISIS wannabes”, defence department spokesman Arsenio Andolong told AFP, using another name for the Islamic State.
Wilnor Papa, a campaign officer for the Manila office of Amnesty International, said rampant killings were the outcome of the failure of previous administrations to bring criminal charges against Mr. Duterte.
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During the same hearing on Thursday, Ronald Bato, the Philippine police chief, told senators that as of Thursday, at least 1,506 people had been killed in police operations against illegal drugs, while there were 2,035 murders by unknown assailants that are under investigation.
