DUTERTE ORDERED MURDERS: HIT MAN

MANILA, PHILIPPINES • In an extraordinary hearing in the Philippine Senate, a witness claimed President Rodrigo Duterte paid him to carry out executions that involved, among other things, feeding a body to a crocodile, chopping up corpses and murder by packing tape.

Edgar Matobato spent years working as part of the so-called “Davao Death Squad,” a group of killers associated with the president’s time as a city mayor, he told a Senate hearing investigating a recent wave of killings that has claimed more than 3,000 lives as part of the president’s anti-drug campaign.

Matobato’s claims linked President Duterte and his son, Paolo Duterte, to a list of crimes worthy of a gangster film. He said the executions left about 1,000 dead.

Matobato said he and fellow assassins referred to then-mayor Duterte using the code name “Charlie Mike,” and he ordered them to kill dozens of people ranging from drug pushers, to the dance-instructor boyfriend of Duterte’s sister, to a millionaire hotelier.

“Our job was to kill criminals like drug pushers, rapists, snatchers. These are the kind we killed every day,” said Matobato.

Matobato, who claimed he had carried out about 50 deadly assaults as an assassin, including a suspected kidnapper fed to a crocodile in 2007, said most 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.

“People in Davao City were like chickens — they were being killed without any reason,” he said.

The hearing’s chair, Sen. Leila de Lima, is a longtime critic of Duterte’s human rights record. She said she saw the testimony as a step toward truth and justice for victims of the president’s alleged purges, past and present. “People deserve to know,” she said.

A Duterte ally, Sen. Alan Cayetano, dismissed Matobato’s sworn testimony as “lies,” questioning his credibility and casting the whole process as a politically motivated plot against the president. A spokesman for the president denied the allegation.

Duterte swept to power this spring promising to crackdown on crime, just as he did as the longtime mayor of Davao, where he earned a reputation for strongman tactics and was christened “the death squad mayor” for allegedly overseeing extrajudicial killings.

During this year’s campaign Duterte did not shy away from his “death squad” moniker, promising he would kill 100,000 criminals in six months.

The deaths have been condemned by the United Nations and questioned by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Duterte has shrugged off all criticism, instead railing against U.S. colonialism in the saltiest possible terms.

AARON FAVILA / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Edgar Matobato testified before the Philippine Senate on Thursday that he spent years working as an assassin for President Rodrigo Duterte, who allegedly paid him to execute about 1,000 people, most of whom were criminals.