MANILA: Rodrigo Duterte shot dead a justice department employee and ordered the murder of opponents, a former death squad member told parliament Thursday, 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 have 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 road blocked by the vehicle of an agent from the justice department’s National Bureau of Investigation.
A confrontation degenerated into a shootout. Rodrigo Duterte, mayor of the southern city of Davao 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 magazines on him.”
Gruesome detail
His testimony fleshed out in gruesome detail for the first time long-running allegations Duterte was behind a death squad that killed more than a thousand people in Davao, where he was mayor for most of the past two decades.
“Our job was to kill criminals, rapists, pushers, and snatchers. That’s what we did. We killed people almost on a daily basis,” said Matobato.
He said they killed mainly criminal suspects and personal enemies of the Duterte family between 1988 and 2013.
Matobato said he and his hit squad mates, at the instigation of then Davao Mayor Duterte, were in an ambush position ready to mow down Leila De Lima and her team in 2009 when, as head of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), De Lima led a fact-finding mission that unearthed human remains near the entrance of the hilly Laud Quarry (or Maa property) where some of the death squad's victims were allegedly buried.
Matobato claimed his ambush team-mates were positioned on a hill within the property, but De Lima's team only investigated one site within the property, near the entrance, and did not approach where the ambush team was positioned.
At the Senate hearing on Friday, De Lima asked Matobato: "Marami kayong nililibang dyan sa Laud or Maa property" (You buried many people within that Laud or Maa property), Matobato nodded and said "Opo" ("Yes"). [Video: 6.41]
Moreover, Matobato claimed that two communist rebel returnees in June 2014 had killed Richard King, a rich Cebu-based businessman, at the instigation of Paolo Duterte, and were paid Ph500,000 for the assassination.
Paolo, son of President Rodrigo Duterte and now the vice mayor of Davao (his sister Sara is also the Mayor), was then competing with Richard King for a woman who Matobato only identified by her family name "Chua", who allegedly owned a McDonald's franchise in Davao. [Video: 6.55]
In July, President Duterte, told a news conference in Malacañang that King was involved in illegal drugs trade. He said King, who owned hotels in Visayas and Mindanao, was one of the “connections” of Herbert Colangco, a big-time drug personality, who is detained at the New Bilibid Prison (NBP).
King’s family, who cried foul over the insinuations, however, said through a lawyer on Friday they were not convinced the Paolo Duterte masterminded the killing of Richard.
Doubt
Duterte’s spokesman, Martin Andanar, said he doubted that the then mayor could have ordered the killing of 1,000 people, adding investigations had proved him innocent.
“I don’t think he’s capable of giving a directive like that. The Commission on Human Rights already investigated this a long time ago and no charges were filed,” he said.
Another spokesman, Ernesto Abella, said the allegations needed to be properly scrutinised.
“Whatever testimonies, statements that the chairperson (of the Senate committee) are saying, we will have to have a proper investigation regarding that.”
Though the existence of Davao death squads has never actually been proven, the term is familiar in the Philippines and part of the narrative behind Duterte's meteoric rise to the presidency as a no-nonsense crime buster determined to cure the country's of its ills.
The United Nations and United States have expressed concern about his latest crackdown, and received profane and angry rebukes from Duterte, who has told them not to interfere.
Paolo Duterte issued a statement pouring water on Matobato's testimony, which he said was "all based on hearsays".
Little is known about Matobato, who volunteered to give testimony in a senate investigation led by Leila de Lima, a former justice minister who has denounced Duterte's crackdown.
De Lima has yet to say why she did not seek to prosecute Duterte over the Davao killings when she was justice minister in the previous administration when Matobato first came to her for protection.
Matobato told the hearing he once served as a paramilitary who fought Maoist rebels and decided to tell all that he knew about the Davao death squad after being made a "fall guy" in the killing of a Davao businessman.
