How a secretive police squad racked up kills in govt’s anti-drug campaign
QUEZON CITY — The police who burst into Kathrina Polo’s house on a rainy night in August 2016, then shot her husband in the head and heart, spoke a language she recognized but didn’t understand: Visayan.
It’s a common language in the southern Philippines. But in Ms. Polo’s poor neighborhood in Quezon City, hundreds of miles to the north, Visayan is rarely heard. “The police kept talking in Visayan because they knew I didn’t understand,” she recalled. Their use of Visayan was a clue to the identity of her husband’s killers.
The officers belonged to what would become the deadliest police station in Quezon City Police District. Called Station 6, or Batasan Station, it is on a violent front line in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.
Of the 12 police stations in Quezon City, which is part of Metro Manila, Station 6 was by far the most lethal. Its officers killed 108 people in anti-drug operations from July 2016 through June 2017, the campaign’s first year, accounting for 39% of the city’s body count, according to Quezon City Police District crime reports reviewed and analyzed by Reuters.
Almost all of these killings were carried out by Station 6’s anti-drug unit, the reports show. The officers who formed the core of that unit hailed from or near Davao, the southern hometown of President Rodrigo R. Duterte. They called themselves the “Davao Boys” — and spoke in the region’s language, Visayan.
There were 10 of them, their boss, Lito Patay, told Reuters. He took command of Station 6 in July 2016, shortly after the start of Mr. Duterte’s drug war. Mr. Patay is also from Davao, where he once led a paramilitary police unit. Asked about Station 6’s high death toll under his command, he said his officers only killed armed suspects who fought back.
“I don’t feel bad because we are just defending ourselves,” Mr. Patay said in November. “We always follow the rule of law.”
He said the men previously served under him in Davao, but declined to identify them. But eight of the Davao Boys’ names appear on a police transfer order which one of them posted on Facebook. Those names matched the Quezon City crime reports reviewed by Reuters. The reports showed that this small group of men was involved in more than half of Station 6’s drug- related killings, 62 out of 108 deaths, including the three operations with the highest body count.
Only one of the officers, Charles Owen Molinos, agreed to be interviewed by Reuters. When asked what was so special about Davao cops, he smiled and said: “Special kill skills.”
Reuters spent four months retracing the Davao Boys’ deadly path through Quezon City, speaking to scores of police officers and bereaved families and analyzing thousands of police crime reports covering the first year of the drug war. These reports don’t specify which officers pulled the trigger but usually name officers who took part in an operation. After arriving in Quezon City, the Davao Boys were quickly involved in dozens of kills in what police described as legitimate drug busts, but relatives, human rights monitors and lawyers say were often executions.