Duterte ‘ ordered killings’ as mayor
A former Filipino militiaman has testified before the country’s Senate 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 1000 dead.
Edgar Matobato, 57, told the nationally televised Senate committee hearing that he heard Duterte order some of the killings, and acknowledged that he himself carried out about 50 deadly assaults as an assassin, including a suspected kidnapper fed to a crocodile in 2007 in southern Davao del Sur province.
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.
Human Rights Watch late yesterday urged the Philippine Government to order an independent investigation into the “very serious allegations” of direct involvement by Duterte “in extrajudicial killings”.
Brad Adams, the rights group’s Asia director, said: “President Duterte can’t be expected to investigate himself, so it is crucial that the United Nations is called in to lead such an effort. Otherwise, Filipinos may never know if the President was directly responsible for extrajudicial killings.”
The Senate committee inquiry was led by Senator Leila de Lima, a staunch critic of Duterte’s anti- drug campaign that has left more than 3000 suspected drug users and dealers dead since he assumed the presidency in June.
Duterte has accused de Lima of involvement in illegal drugs, alleging that she used to have a driver who took money from detained drug lords. She has denied the allegations. Matobato said Duterte had once even issued an order to kill de Lima, when she chaired the Commission on Human Rights and was investigating the mayor’s possible role in extrajudicial killings in 2009 in Davao. He said he and others were waiting to ambush 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.
“If you went inside the upper portion, we were already in ambush position,” Matobato told de Lima. “It’s good that you left.”
The recent killings of suspected drug dealers have sparked concerns in the Philippines and among UN and US officials, including President Barack Obama, who have urged Duterte’s gOvernment to take steps to rapidly stop the killings and ensure his anti- drug war complies with human rights laws and the rule of law.
Duterte has rejected the criticisms, questioning the right of the UN, the US and Obama to raise human rights issues.
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 that he had backed away from the killings after feeling guilty and entered a government witness- protection programme.
He left the protection programme when Duterte became President, fearing he would be killed, and said he decided to surface now “so the killings will stop”.