Witness says Philippines president, as mayor, ordered killing of criminals

MANILA, Philippines — A former Filipino militiaman testified before the country’s Senate on Thursday 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 1,000 dead.

Edgar Matobato, 57, told the nationally televised Senate committee hearing that he heard Mr. 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 Mr. 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.” Mr. Matobato is the first person to admit any role in such killings, and to directly implicate Mr. Duterte under oath in a public hearing.

The Senate committee inquiry was led by Sen. Leila de Lima, a staunch critic of Mr. Duterte’s antidrug campaign that has left more than 3,000 suspected drug users and dealers dead since he assumed the presidency in June. Mr. Duterte has accused Ms. de Lima of involvement in illegal drugs. She has denied the allegations.

Mr. Matobato said Mr. Duterte had once even issued an order to kill Ms. 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 Ms. de Lima but she did not go where they were waiting to open fire.

The recent killings of suspected drug dealers have sparked concerns in the Philippines and among U.N. and U.S. officials who have urged Mr. Duterte’s government to take steps to rapidly stop the killings.

Mr. Duterte has rejected the criticisms, questioning the right of these officials to raise human rights issues, when U.S. forces, for example, had massacred Muslims in the country’s south in the early 1900s as part of a pacification campaign.

Mr. Matobato said under oath that the killings went on from 1988, when Mr. Duterte first became Davao city mayor, to 2013, when Mr. 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.

Mr. Matobato added that he entered a government witness-protection program.

Presidential spokesman Martin Andanar said government investigations into Mr. Duterte’s time as mayor of Davao had already gone nowhere because of a lack of evidence and witnesses.