Duterte killed justice official, hitman tells Philippine senate

MANILA: Rodrigo Duterte shot dead a justice department employee and ordered the murder of opponents, a former death squad member told parliament yesterday, in explosive allegations against the Philippine president.

The self-described assassin told a Senate hearing that he and a group of policemen and ex-communist rebels killed about 1,000 people over 25 years on Duterte’s orders — one of them fed alive to a crocodile.

Many of the others were garroted, burned, quartered and then buried at a quarry owned by a police officer who was a member of the death squad. Others were dumped at sea to be eaten by fish.

Edgar Matobato, 57, made the allegations before the Senate, which is investigating alleged extrajudicial killings in Duterte’s anti-crime crackdown that police said has left 3,140 people dead in his first 72 days in office.

The then head of the Commission on Human Rights, Senator Leila de Lima, told the inquiry Matobato had surrendered to the investigatory body in 2009 and had until recently been in a witness protection scheme.

Duterte’s spokesman said the allegations had already been investigated without charges being filed while his son, Paolo Duterte, called the testimony ‘mere hearsay’ of ‘a madman’.

Matobato said that in 1993, he and other members of the death squad were on a mission when they approached a Davao road blocked by the vehicle of an agent from the justice department’s National Bureau of Investigation.

A confrontation led to a shootout that left the agent wounded and out of bullets. Rodrigo Duterte, the Davao mayor at the time, then arrived on the scene, Matobato said.

“Mayor Duterte was the one who finished him off. Jamisola (the justice department official) was still alive when he (Duterte) arrived. He emptied two Uzi (submachine gun) magazines on him.”

“I didn’t kill anyone unless ordered by Charlie Mike,” he said, telling the senate it was the death squad’s coded reference to Duterte, who was then mayor of the southern city of Davao, using the phonetic alphabet. — AFP