PHILIPPINE President Rodrigo Duterte is once again in the spotlight for extrajudicial executions that supposedly occurred under his watch, this time over the string of Davao city murders that took place before his ascension to top office.
Advertisement
Others were garroted, burned, quartered and then buried at a quarry owned by a police officer who was a member of the death squad. Others were dumped at sea to be eaten by fish.
On Thursday, Edgar Matobato, an alleged member of the so-called “Davao Death Squad”, attended the Senate hearing on extrajudicial killings and spoke about several instances when Duterte instructed them to execute people.
Motabato’s testimony were “based on lies, falsities, (and) fabrications” such that Mr. Duterte didn’t bother to respond at all to the allegations during his speech in Bulacan delivered in front of the First Scout Ranger Regiment (FSRR).
Matobato said he was part of the group that were stopped on a road by the agent of the justice department’s National Bureau of Investigation, which led to a shootout that wounded the official.
“President Duterte can’t be expected to investigate himself”, Brad Adams, its Asia director, said in a statement.
Matobato accused Duterte of ordering the DDS to kill a journalist who was critical of him. “He emptied two Uzi magazines on him”, Matobato said.
According to Matobato, Duterte ordered him and others to kill about 1,000 criminals or political rivals over a 25-year period.
Duterte swept to power this spring promising to crackdown on crime, just as he did as the longtime mayor of Davao, where he earned a reputation for strongman tactics and was christened “the death squad mayor” for allegedly overseeing extra-judicial killings.
He explained: ‘Our job was to kill criminals, rapists, pushers, and snatchers. That’s what we did. He said that with the huge number of people, including government officials, who are involved in the crime, “even if I wanted to, I can not kill them all.”.
“Me? They are saying that I’m part of a death squad?”
“What makes it worse”, he said, is that “people in government” are now running the drug trafficking operations.
He told the Senate panel he had gone from a witness protection programme into hiding when Mr Duterte became president, fearing for his life.
Mr Matobato said his gang’s victims ranged from petty criminals to high-profile figures associated with Mr Duterte’s opponents, including a wealthy businessman from central Cebu province who was shot dead in his office in 2014, allegedly because of a feud with the mayor’s son over a woman.
Duterte has rejected the criticisms, questioning the right of the United Nations, the US and Obama to raise human rights issues, when USA forces, for example, had massacred Muslims in the country’s south in the early 1900s as part of a pacification campaign.
“You can not wage a war without killing”, Duterte said, adding that many drug users were beyond rehabilitation”.
The boyfriend of Duterte’s sister, along with Davao broadcaster and Duterte critic Jun Pala, four bodyguards of a local rival, and two enemies of Duterte’s son Paolo, now Davao vice mayor, were also killed, Matobato added. Gen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who was also present during the hearing, said that he did not know Matobato personally despite the latter saying that he knew the police chief. “They are mere hearsay”.
Advertisement
Separately, eight prisoners were transferred to a high security military camp on Friday in preparation for giving testimony in a lower house investigation into De Lima’s alleged drugs ties.
