The agent ran out of bullets and was wounded in a shootout before Rodrigo Duterte, the Davao mayor at the time, showed up armed with a submachine gun, Matobato said. He has bragged about killing three men suspected of kidnapping and raping a woman.
Advertisement
The President has hit out at U.S., the United Nations and other groups raising concerns over human rights and global law, calling Barack Obama a “son of a whore” earlier this month.
Matubato said he was recruited to a death squad with five others in 1988, when Duterte first served as mayor.
Since taking office as president this summer, Duterte has been linked to the gangland style killings of roughly 3,000 suspected drug users and dealers throughout the country.
There was no immediate reaction from Duterte, who has denied any role in extra-judicial killings when he was the longtime mayor of Davao and since becoming president. One order, he recalled, included feeding a man’s body to a crocodile in 2007. The death squad regularly dumped bodies into the sea with their stomachs eviscerated so they would sink, he said. When Duterte, who was mayor at the time, arrived at the scene, Matobato said, he “emptied two Uzi magazines on him”.
De Lima has yet to say why she did not seek to prosecute Duterte over the Davao killings when she was justice minister in the previous administration, when the former hitman first came to her for protection.
Mr Matobato also alleged Mr Duterte ordered the bombing of a mosque in retaliation for an attack Davao Cathedral in 1993.
He said he and fellow assassins referred to then-mayor Duterte using the code name, “Charlie Mike”, and he ordered them to kill dozens of people ranging from drug pushers, to the dance-instructor boyfriend of Duterte’s sister, to a millionaire hotelier.
It said “there is no evidence to support the killings attributed to or attributable to the DDS”. “I’ll kill you, ‘ he said, as The Guardian reported”.
A spokesman for Duterte, Martin Andanar, denied the allegations.
Paolo Duterte, the president’s son, called the testimony a “mere hearsay of a madman”.
Edgar Matobato revealed that he was recruited by Duterte as a member of the Lambado Boys in the late 1980s.
Pimentel pointed out the Senate approved the resolution empowering the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights chaired by Senator Leila de Lima to conduct an investigation “in aid of legislation” of the alleged rampant human rights violations.
His testimony pictured out in awful detail that Mr Duterte was behind a death squad that killed more than a thousand people in Davao while he was the mayor for the past two decades.
During his campaign, Duterte said: “Forget the law on human rights”. Pala had been a constant critic of corruption in Davao and some of his work focused on Duterte. “I don’t think he is capable of giving those orders”, he told reporters.
Living up to his nickname, Duterte’s presidential campaign vowed to bring back capital punishment and give security forces the right to “shoot to kill”.
Since Duterte took office on June 30, more than 2,000 people have been killed in his self-proclaimed “war on drugs”.
Of the 3,000 deaths, 1,490 are under investigation as of September 10 with authorities blaming suspected vigilante groups.
Death squads have also killed gang members and children in Davao, the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in a 2009 report on extrajudicial violence in the Philippines, citing interviews with dozens of the victims’ relatives.
Rodrigo Duterte has also been accused of ordering death squads to murder criminals, Muslims and political opponents. “True. That is true”.
A senator, however, spotted some loopholes in Matobato’s testimony.
Advertisement
Matobato said that militiamen were in position to ambush Lima near a suspected grave.
