According to Philippines police, almost 3,000 people have been killed in police anti-drug operations and extrajudicial killings in the past more than two months.
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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.
The assassin told a senate hearing that he and a group of police officers and former communist rebels had killed about1 000 people over 25 years on Duterte’s orders – one of them being fed alive to a crocodile.
“I am perplexed, disturbed, and extremely disappointed with the Senate President’s refusal to grant protective custody to Edgar Matobato”, De Lima said.
“The Duterte administration is committed to a platform of a peaceful, crime-free, corruption-free nation that is not affected by any controversy”, presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said.
But Mr Matobato explained, when Mr Duterte won the presidency he had left the program and went into hiding, fearing for his life.
Worldwide leaders have also expressed concern, including President Obama, who has urged Duterte to observe the rule of law and human rights.
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. “They are mere hearsay”.
“Our job was to kill criminals like drug pushers, rapists, snatchers”.
During his testimony, Matobato named Duterte as responsible for numerous killings in Davao City when the latter was still mayor.
Vice President Leni Robredo slammed Senator Alan Peter Cayetano over the “serious” allegations against her and the Liberal Party to which she belongs over an alleged plot to oust Duterte using self-confessed hitman Matobato.
Mr. Duterte has denied involvement with the Davao Death Squad, but Matobato told Thursday’s Senate inquiry that he and other members of the liquidation squad took orders from him and killed about 1,000 suspected criminals and opponents of Mr. Duterte and his family.
President Barack Obama, U.N. officials and human rights watchdogs have raised concerns over the widespread killings, but Duterte has lashed back at them and other critics. “These are the kind we killed every day”, the 57-year-old said.
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.
Matobato’s testimony set off a tense exchange between pro-Duterte and opposition senators. “Give me a little extension, maybe of another six months”, he said.
Senator and former national police chief Panfilo Lacson warned Mr Matobato: “You can be jailed with your revelations”.
De Lima said she was withdrawing the request to Pimentel and would instead “bring the issue to the Committee, with the end in view of asserting our inherent and ancillary power as a Senate Committee conducting an inquiry in aid of legislation to grant the witness protective custody of the Senate”.
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Duterte has immunity from lawsuits as a president, but de Lima said that principle may have to be revisited now.
