Faceless killers in Philippine drug war

MANILA // Unknown assassins have killed scores of poor victims in the Philippines since president Rodrigo Duterte ordered police last month to withdraw from his deadly drug war, according to a human rights monitor.

The assailants are killing between 9 and 10 people every day, said Amnesty International’s Philippine branch.

This is fewer than the 30 or so a day killed by police and others when officers were still leading the campaign, but the targets are unchanged.

“The targets are still the same: people linked to drugs and who live in poor neighbourhoods,” campaign official Wilnor Papa said.

Mr Duterte pulled police from the operation on January 31 after a seven-month campaign in which 2,555 drug suspects were killed by law enforcement.

A total of 4,076 murder cases are under investigation this month, 146 more than last month.

Police found four men shot dead inside a shanty in northern Manila before dawn on Thursday. Witnesses said men broke into the house and started shooting, while three were shot dead in separate incidents elsewhere in the same district that night, according to police.

Mr Duterte ordered police operations in the drug war to cease so he could tackle widespread corruption in the force.

This came after anti-drug officers kidnapped a South Korean businessman, then murdered him inside the national police headquarters as part of an extortion racket, according to an investigation.

But Mr Duterte promised the war would continue and more addicts and traffickers would be killed.

Amnesty issued a report this month accusing police of systemic human-rights abuses in the drug war, including shooting dead defenceless people, paying assassins to murder addicts and theft.

It also said police were being paid by their superiors to kill.

Mr Duterte has since ordered the much smaller drug enforcement agency to lead the drug crackdown, with support from the military.

Derrick Carreon, spokesman for the drug agency, which has nearly 1,800 members, said there had been far fewer killings by authorities since it took charge but failed to provide exact figures.

“There is no point in comparing these figures because the police is a much larger organisation capable of conducting more operations,” Mr Carreon said.