Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the killings of around 1,000 criminals and political opponents while he was a city mayor – and shot one of them himself, a former assassin has claimed.
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According to Edgar Matobato, an alleged former member of a death squad comprising policemen and soldiers, Duterte ordered the kidnapping and murder of four followers of his rival to Davao mayorship, Prospero Nograles, Efe news reported.
The allegations surfaced as the Senate committee on justice and human rights investigated alleged extrajudicial killings in Mr. Duterte’s brutal war on drugs, which has taken more than 3,000 lives since he launched the crackdown upon taking office on June 30.
The then head of the Commission on Human Rights‚ senator Leila de Lima‚ told the inquiry Matobato had surrendered to the investigatory body in 2009and had until recently been in a witness protection scheme.
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.
National police chief, Ronald Dela Rosa called Matobato a “false witness” and said death squads never existed in Davao.
The killings he said he has knowledge of happened starting in 1988, when Duterte first became mayor, to 2013, when he expressed his desire to leave the death squad, prompting his colleagues to implicate him criminally in one killing.
“They were killed like chickens”, he told the televised hearing.
There was no immediate reaction from Mr Duterte, who has denied any role in extra-judicial killings when he was the mayor of Davao and after he assumed the presidency.
Matobato said the victims in Davao allegedly ranged from petty criminals to people associated with Duterte’s political opponents, and included a wealthy businessman who was killed in central Cebu province allegedly because of a feud with Duterte’s son over a woman.
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). Another was a radio commentator, Jun Pala, who was critical of Mr Duterte and was killed by motorcycle-riding gunmen while walking home in 2003.
Another allegation is that Rodrigo Duterte once ordered the bombing of a mosque in retaliation for an attack on Davao Cathedral in 1993.
DAMNING murder allegations against President Rodrigo Duterte by a self-confessed former Filipino hitman has sparked a media storm in the Philippines. “But what I can say is that not everyone who uses drugs is capable of committing those crimes of stealing and eventually killing”.
Matobato’s testimony set off a tense exchange between pro-Duterte and opposition senators.
As a result, De Lima said she is now withdrawing her committee’s request and “instead, I will 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”.
“You can not wage a war without killing”, Duterte said, adding that many drug users were beyond rehabilitation”.
‘You have no immunity’.
But Andanar pointed out that even the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) already failed to prove the existence of the said death squad.
The ST report tells only of Duterte’s side of the story thus: “Mr Duterte has accused Ms de Lima of initiating the probe to derail his campaign, saying she has been coddling drug kingpins”. He said he and others were waiting to ambush Ms de Lima but she did not go to a part of a hilly area – a suspected mass grave – where they were waiting to open fire.
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Mr. Duterte said he told Obama that he never called him a “son of a bitch” and that the United States president told him, “My men will talk to you”.
