Some of the victims were shot and dumped on Davao streets or buried in three unmarked graves, he said, adding some were disposed of in the sea with their stomachs cut open so they would not float and would be eaten by fish right away.
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Edgar Matobato, a 57-year-old former Filipino militiaman, testified before Philippine’s Senate and said that Duterte had ordered him and other members of a liquidation squad to conduct the killings when the president was still a city mayor and eyeing the presidential seat. Matibato alleged that Duterte “emptied two Uzi magazines on” Jamisola, an agent from the justice department’s National Bureau of Investigation in 1993.
He told how Duterte had once rushed to the scene when the mayor’s men encountered a government agent.
Matobato said under oath that Duterte, through his supposed “right hand man”, a certain Arthur Lascañas, ordered Pala killed because the Davao-based radio commentator had been criticizing Duterte repeatedly.
He explained that his only job was to kill criminals, as well as anyone who got in the mayor’s way. That’s what we did.
Since his election more than 3,000 drug users and dealers have been killed in police operations or by vigilantes, according to the authorities, amid global alarm over human rights violations.
“The people of Davao were being slaughtered like chicken”, he said, adding he lied to his wife about butchering chickens when she saw his blood-spattered shirts.
“We killed people nearly on a daily basis” between 1988 and 2013, said Matobato, adding they also killed Duterte family foes and an “international terrorist”.
‘The officers told us ordinary killings won’t do. He said they mutilated the bodies of their victims, cutting them up and dumping them on the side of the road, wrapping them in masking tape sometimes to avoid identification, and even feeding one body to a crocodile. He said he chose to tell what he knew about the Davao death squads after being made a “fall guy” in the killing of a businessman in the city.
He was admitted to the justice department’s witness protection programme but left to go into hiding when Duterte won the presidency. They are saying I’m part of a death squad.
Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre described Matobato’s testimony as “lies, fabrications and a product of a fertile and a coached imagination”.
In 2012 the Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights confirmed earlier reports, including by Human Rights Watch, of targeted and systematic killings in Davao, on the southern tip of Mindanao island.
Duterte ran for president on the promise he would wage an aggressive war on drugs.
He said that there was “no showing” that Matobato’s life is in danger and that his testimony at the Senate on Thursday did not have anything to do with the spate in extrajudicial killings attributed to the government’s war on drugs, the original subject of the Senate committee’s investigation.
Martin Andanar, a spokesperson for Mr Duterte, denied the allegation.
Paolo Duterte, the president’s son, called the testimony a “mere hearsay of a madman”.
“I never realised the (illegal drug) problem is this big”, Duterte said when he presented a freed Norwegian hostage who had been released a day ago from captivity by the Abu Sayyaf bandits.
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Ms De Lima eventually declared Mr Cayetano, who was not a member of the committee, “out of order” and ordered Senate security personnel to restrain him.
