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MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte told a Senate inquiry Monday that he had maintained a “death squad” of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of a southern Philippine city.
Duterte, however, denied authorizing police to gun down thousands of suspects in a bloody crackdown on illegal drugs he had ordered as president and which is the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court as a possible crime against humanity.
Duterte, 79, attended the televised inquiry in his first public appearance since his term ended in 2022. The Senate is looking into the drug killings under Duterte, which were unprecedented in their scale in recent Philippine history.
Duterte acknowledged without elaborating that he once maintained a death squad of seven “gangsters” to deal with criminals when he was the longtime Davao city mayor, before he became president.
“I can make the confession now if you want,” Duterte said. “I had a death squad of seven, but they were not policemen, they were also gangsters.”
“I’ll ask a gangster to kill somebody,” Duterte said. “If you will not kill (that person), I will kill you now.”
Sen. Aquilino Pimentel III, who was overseeing the inquiry, and Sen. Risa Hontiveros, pressed Duterte to provide more details but the former president responded in unclear terms and said he would explain further in the next hearing.
Often cursing during the hearing, Duterte said he would take full responsibility for the killings that happened while he was president from 2016 to 2022. But he said he never ordered his national police chiefs, who also attended the inquiry, to undertake extrajudicial killings.
"Did I ever tell you to kill any criminal?” Duterte asked his former police chiefs. They included Ronald dela Rosa, the current senator who first enforced Duterte's campaign against illegal drugs as his national police chief.
"No, Mr. president,” dela Rosa responded.
Aside from the International Criminal Court’s investigation, there have been no known criminal complaints filed against Duterte in Philippine courts over the killings.
“I’m puzzled why the Justice Department hasn’t filed any case,” Duterte said. “I’ve been killing people for a long time and they haven’t filed any case up to now?"
Former Sen. Leila de Lima, one of the most vocal critics of Duterte who once investigated the drug killings in Davao, said there were adequate evidence and witnesses of the extrajudicial killings but they were scared of testifying against Duterte when he was in power.
De Lima was arrested early on in Duterte’s presidency on drug charges she said were fabricated to stop her from proceeding with her Senate investigation. She was cleared of the charges and released from more than six years of detention last year.
"This man, the former mayor of Davao city and the former president of the Republic of the Philippines, for so long has evaded justice and accountability,” said de Lima, sitting near the former president.
"We have not made him to account after all these years,” she said, and added that witnesses could now surface and help prosecute Duterte and his associates.
Arturo Lascanas, a retired police officer who served under Duterte for many years in a unit fighting heinous crime in Davao, told The Associated Press in an interview in 2022 that as many as 10,000 suspects may have been killed in Davao city on orders of Duterte and the former mayor’s key aides, including him.
Lascanas, who has gone into hiding abroad, said he had provided his testimony and other evidence to the International Criminal Court.
Duterte's associates may have removed the remains of the large number of victims buried in a quarry site in Davao city but Lascanas said the remains of some victims who were buried elsewhere by his group of policemen could still be retrieved and used as key evidence against the former leader and others.
Duterte sounded defiant through the hearing.
"If I’m given another chance, I’ll wipe all of you,” Duterte said of drug dealers and criminals, who he added had resumed their criminal actions after he stepped down from the presidency.
One of Asia’s most unorthodox contemporary leaders, Duterte ended his turbulent six-year term in June 2022, closing out more than three decades in the country’s often-rowdy politics, where he built a political name for his expletives-laced outbursts and disdain for human rights and the West while reaching out to China and Russia.
Activists regarded him as “a human rights calamity” not only for the widespread deaths under his so-called war on drugs but also for his brazen attacks on critical media, the dominant Catholic church and political opposition.