Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte told a Senate inquiry Monday that he had maintained a “death squad” of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of a southern Philippine city.
Duterte, nonetheless, denied authorizing police to gun down 1000’s of suspects in a bloody crackdown on illegal drugs he had ordered as president and which is the topic of an investigation by the International Criminal Court as a possible crime against humanity.
Duterte, 79, attended the televised inquiry in his first public appearance since his term led to 2022. The Senate is looking into the drug killings under Duterte, which were unprecedented of their scale in recent Philippine history.
Duterte acknowledged without elaborating that he once maintained a death squad of seven “gangsters” to take care of criminals when he was the longtime Davao city mayor, before he became president.
“I could make the confession now in the event you want,” Duterte said. “I had a death squad of seven, but they weren’t policemen, they were also gangsters.”
“I’ll ask a gangster to kill any individual,” Duterte said. “If you won’t kill (that person), I’ll kill you now.”
Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III, who was overseeing the inquiry, and Sen. Risa Hontiveros, pressed Duterte to supply more details but the previous president responded in unclear terms and said he would explain further in the subsequent hearing.
Often cursing in the course of the hearing, Duterte said he would take full responsibility for the killings that happened while he was president from 2016 to 2022. But he said he never ordered his national police chiefs, who also attended the inquiry, to undertake extrajudicial killings.
“Did I ever inform you to kill any criminal?” Duterte asked his former police chiefs. They included Ronald Dela Rosa, the present senator who first enforced Duterte’s campaign against illegal drugs as his national police chief.
“No, Mr. president,” dela Rosa responded.
Aside from the International Criminal Court’s ongoing investigation, there have been no known criminal complaints filed against Duterte in Philippine courts over the killings.
“I’m puzzled why the Justice Department hasn’t filed any case,” Duterte said. “I’ve been killing people for a very long time they usually haven’t filed any case to this point?”
Former Sen. Leila de Lima, one of the crucial vocal critics of Duterte who once investigated the drug killings in Davao, said there was adequate evidence and witnesses of the extrajudicial killings but they were petrified of testifying against Duterte when he was in power.
De Lima was arrested early on in Duterte’s presidency on drug charges she said were fabricated to stop her from proceeding together with her Senate investigation. She was cleared of the costs and released from greater than six years of detention last 12 months.
“This man, the previous mayor of Davao city and the previous president of the Republic of the Philippines, for therefore long has evaded justice and accountability,” said de Lima, sitting near the previous president.
“We haven’t made him to account in any case these years,” she said, and added that witnesses could now surface and help prosecute Duterte and his associates.
Arturo Lascanas, a retired police officer who served under Duterte for a few years in a unit fighting heinous crime in Davao, told The Associated Press in an interview in 2022 that as many as 10,000 suspects could have been killed in Davao city on orders of Duterte and the previous mayor’s key aides, including him.
Lascanas, who has gone into hiding abroad, said he had provided his testimony and other evidence to the International Criminal Court.
Duterte’s associates could have removed the stays of the big variety of victims buried in a quarry site in Davao city but Lascanas said the stays of some victims who were buried elsewhere by his group of policemen could still be retrieved and used as key evidence against the previous leader and others.
Duterte sounded defiant through the hearing.
“If I’m given one other probability, I’ll wipe all of you,” Duterte said of drug dealers and criminals, who he added had resumed their criminal actions after he stepped down from the presidency.
One of Asia’s most unorthodox contemporary leaders, Duterte ended his turbulent six-year term in June 2022, closing out greater than three a long time within the country’s often-rowdy politics, where he built a political name for his expletives-laced outbursts and disdain for human rights and the West while reaching out to China and Russia.
Activists regarded him as “a human rights calamity” not just for the widespread deaths under his so-called war on drugs but in addition for his brazen attacks on critical media, the dominant Catholic church and political opposition.
