‘Duterte photographed with drug-linked Chinese’
MANILA: A former senior Philippine police official said President Rodrigo Duterte, who has faced widespread criticism over his deadly drug crackdown, has been photographed with two Chinese men involved in illegal drugs and that he sent a report to warn him about the two.
Dismissed Senior Superintendent Eduardo Acierto said on Sunday that he’s unaware what government action has been taken after he submitted his report about the Chinese men to top police officials starting in December 2017.
Instead, Acierto said he’s now facing illegal drugs complaints and has been the target of death threats that forced him to go into hiding recently.
“In my investigation, I discovered that our president ... is often accompanied by two people deeply involved in illegal drugs,” Acierto, who was a veteran anti-narcotics official before he was dismissed last year by an antigraft agency, said in a video message shown to reporters before he appeared at a news conference in Manila.
“What popped into my mind at the time was maybe the president isn’t aware that these are suspected drug lords.”
Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency director General Aaron Aquino said he received Acierto’s report and sent it to Duterte’s office, adding that both his office and that of the president took steps to validate the allegations against the two Chinese.
An initial check showed that at least one of the Chinese was not facing any illegal drugs case in the country, he said.
There was a suspected drug dealer in the northern Philippines with the same name as one of the two Chinese Acierto identified in his report, but Aquino said investigators would have to check if they were the same person.
“It’s wrong to say that there was no action taken because it was acted upon,” Aquino said.
He played down the significance of the photographs showing Duterte with the two Chinese men, saying officials often get approached by all sorts of people for group photographs without being able to rapidly check their background. — AP