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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte ordered killings when he was mayor, witness tell

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Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte ordered killings when he was mayor, witness tells senators


September 15, 2016

A former Filipino militiaman testified before the country's Senate on Thursday that President Rodrigo Duterte, when he was still a city mayor, ordered him and other members of a liquidation squad to kill criminals and opponents in gangland-style assaults that left about 1,000 dead. Rights groups have long accused Duterte of involvement in death squads, claims he has denied even while engaging in tough talk in which he stated his approach to criminals was to "kill them all." Matobato is the first person to admit any role in such killings and to directly implicate Duterte under oath in a public hearing.

Matobato said under oath that the killings went on from 1988, when Duterte first became Davao city mayor, to 2013, when Matobato said he expressed his desire to leave the death squad. He said that prompted his colleagues to implicate him criminally in one killing to silence him. "Our job was to kill criminals like drug pushers, rapists, snatchers. These are the kind we killed every day," Matobato said. But he said their targets were not only criminals but also opponents of Duterte and one of his sons, Paolo Duterte, who is now the vice mayor of Davao.

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. "They were killed like chickens," said Matobato, who added he backed away from the killings after feeling guilty and entered a government witness-protection program. He left the protection program when Duterte became president, fearing he would be killed, and said he decided to surface now "so the killings will stop."

The Senate committee inquiry was led by Sen. Leila de Lima, a staunch critic of Duterte's anti-drug campaign that has left more than 3,000 suspected drug users and dealers dead since he assumed the presidency in June. Duterte has immunity from lawsuits as president, but de Lima said that principle may have to be revisited now. "What if a leader is elected and turns out to be a mass murderer?" de Lima asked in a news conference after the Senate hearing.

Duterte has declared an indefinite “state of national emergency”, embraced anti-Americanism, called Obama “son of a whore”, and is moving closer to Beijing.


Related: The UN lambasts Philippines president for “striking lack of understanding” of human rights
 
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