1st police officers are convicted in drug war killing
MANILA — A Philippine court Thursday convicted three police officers for the murder of a 17-year-old boy and sentenced them each to up to 40 years in prison, in the first such conviction in a wave of killings prompted by President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.
Nearly 5,000 people are thought to have been killed by the police, and many more by unofficial militias, since Duterte swore during his 2016 presidential campaign that he would hunt down drug sellers and users and “dump all of you into Manila Bay, and fatten all the fish there.”
But until now, the rampant killing has taken place in an atmosphere of impunity, with Duterte insisting that he would pardon any officers found guilty of murder while carrying out his crackdown. For the first time, his vow will be tested.
“The use of unnecessary force or wanton violence is not justified when the fulfillment of their duty as law enforcers can be affected otherwise,” the judge in the case, Rodolfo Azucena Jr., said in his ruling Thursday. He said a “shoot first and think later attitude” could never be justified.
The dead boy at the center of the case, Kian Loyd delos Santos, was incorrectly identified by an informant as a drug pusher, prosecutors said.
Witnesses had described seeing delos Santos being led away by the officers in August 2017 and shot at close range, his body found slumped near a pigsty some 100 yards away. A neighborhood video camera caught the police officers pulling the subdued boy along minutes before he was found dead.
That contradicted statements by the police officers, who said the boy had pulled a gun and set off a shootout that led to his death. But forensic evidence also showed that he had been shot while in a fetal position.
The officers — Arnel Oares, Jeremias Pereda and Jerwin Cruz — were brought to a lower court in Caloocan City, just north of Manila, under tight security.
Azucena declared that the three officers would serve their sentences without possibility of parole.