Witness Edgar Matobato was not placed under Senate custody because the his testimony is not related to the ongoing Senate probe on extra-judicial killings, Senate President Koko Pimentel told CNN Philippines on Friday.
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They’re just some of the shocking allegations made by self-professed hitman Edgar Matobato before a Senate Inquiry into extrajudicial killings in the Philippines Thursday.
He later retracted that statement in a press conference, telling reporters there were “no Davao death squads”, but the allegations remain and numerous local and worldwide human rights groups have repeatedly criticized his record.
Mr. Matobato said that in 1993, he and other members of the death squad were on a mission when they approached a road blocked by the vehicle of an agent from the justice department’s National Bureau of Investigation.
Justice secretary Vitaliano Aguirre also echoed him, calling the allegations “lies and fabrications”.
She has denied the allegations.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said the United Nations should look into the drugs war and be allowed to interview witnesses like Matobato. “From the time I was chief-of-staff to the time I was elected as congressman, no supporter of ours or persons under our employ was ever killed due to politics”, Nograles, chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, said in a statement.
Mr Matobato was the first to link Mr Duterte to extrajudicial killings in Davao, saying he took part as a member of a “team” that came to be known as the “Lambada boys”, after the Brazilian ballroom dance craze of the mid-1980s.
He told the Senate panel he had gone from a witness protection programme into hiding when Mr Duterte became president, fearing for his life.
Duterte ran for president on the promise he would wage an aggressive war on drugs.
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.
Some have called Matobato’s testimony into question, including Duterte’s son Paolo – the current Vice Mayor of Davao City.
“Our job was to kill criminals like drug pushers, rapists, snatchers”, Matobato said under oath, adding that some of the targets were not criminals but opponents of Duterte and one of his sons.
“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 existence of the “Davao Death Squads” has never been proven, but the term is familiar in the Philippines and has played a part in Duterte’s meteoric rise to the presidency as a no-nonsense crimebuster.
De Lima eventually declared Cayetano “out of order” and ordered Senate security personnel to restrain him. Paolo Duterte dismissed the testimony as “mere hearsay”, saying he would not “dignify the accusations of a madman”, the AP reports.
Ernesto Abella, a presidential spokesman, said the hearing was “a rehash of issues that have already been addressed in 2009” under de Lima, and that “even then no case was filed against then-Mayor Duterte”.
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Dubria also said that he was the station commander of Talomo PNP when then Commission on Human Rights chairman Leila de Lima went to Maa, Davao City to investigate the alleged extrajudicial killings.
