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| Former Filipino militiaman Edgar Matobato shows the kind of tape they use to wrap up dead bodies as he testifies before the Philippine Senate in Pasay, south of Manila, Philippines on Thursday Sept. 15, 2016. Matobato said that Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, when he was still a city mayor, ordered him and other members of a squad to kill criminals and opponents in gangland-style assaults that left about 1,000 dead. |
MANILA,
Philippines (AP) -- 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 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 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." Matobato is the first
person to admit any role in such killings, and to directly implicate
Duterte under oath in a public hearing.
Human
Rights Watch late Friday urged the Philippine government to order an
independent investigation into the "very serious allegations" of direct
involvement by Duterte "in extrajudicial killings."
Brad
Adams, the rights group's Asia director, said: "President Duterte can't
be expected to investigate himself, so it is crucial that the United
Nations is called in to lead such an effort. Otherwise, Filipinos may
never know if the president was directly responsible for extrajudicial
killings."
The Senate committee inquiry was
led by Sen. Leila de Lima, a staunch critic of Duterte's anti-drug
campaign that has left more than 3,000 suspected drug users and dealers
dead since he assumed the presidency in June. Duterte has accused de
Lima of involvement in illegal drugs, alleging that she used to have a
driver who took money from detained drug lords. She has denied the
allegations.
Matobato said Duterte had once
even issued an order to kill 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 de Lima but she did not go to a part of a hilly area -
a suspected mass grave - where they were waiting to open fire.
"If you went inside the upper portion, we were already in ambush position," Matobato told de Lima. "It's good that you left."
The
recent killings of suspected drug dealers have sparked concerns in the
Philippines and among U.N. and U.S. officials, including President
Barack Obama, who have urged Duterte's government to take steps to
rapidly stop the killings and ensure his anti-drug war complies with
human rights laws and the rule of law.
Duterte
has rejected the criticisms, questioning the right of the U.N., the
U.S. and Obama 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.
Matobato
said under oath that the killings went on from 1988, when Duterte first
became Davao city mayor, to 2013, when 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.
"Our
job was to kill criminals like drug pushers, rapists, snatchers. These
are the kind we killed every day," Matobato said. But he said their
targets were not only criminals but also opponents of Duterte and one of
his sons, Paolo Duterte, who is now the vice mayor of Davao.
Presidential
spokesman Martin Andanar rejected the allegations, saying government
investigations into Duterte's time as mayor of Davao had already gone
nowhere because of a lack of evidence and witnesses.
Philippine
human rights officials and advocates have previously said potential
witnesses refused to testify against Duterte when he was still mayor out
of fear of being killed.
There was no
immediate reaction from Duterte. Another Duterte spokesman, Ernesto
Abella, said at a news conference that while Matobato "may sound
credible, it is imperative that each and every one of us properly weigh
whatever he said and respond right."
Matobato
said the victims in Davao allegedly ranged from petty criminals to a
wealthy businessman from central Cebu province who was killed in 2014 in
his office in Davao city, allegedly because of a feud with Paolo
Duterte over a woman. The president's son said the allegations were
without proof and "are mere hearsay," telling reporters he would "not
dignify the accusations of a mad man."
Other
victims were a suspected foreign militant whom Matobato said he
strangled, then chopped into pieces and buried in a quarry in 2002.
Another was a radio commentator, Jun Pala, who was critical of Duterte
and was killed by motorcycle-riding gunmen while walking home in 2003.
After
a 1993 bombing of a Roman Catholic cathedral in Davao city, Matobato
said Duterte ordered him and his colleagues to launch attacks on mosques
in an apparent retaliation. He testified he hurled a grenade at one
mosque but there were no casualties because the attacks were carried out
when no one was praying.
Matobato said some
of the squad's victims were shot and dumped on Davao streets or buried
in three secret pits, while others were disposed of at sea with their
stomachs cut open and their bodies tied to concrete blocks.
"They
were killed like chickens," said Matobato, who added he that backed
away from the killings after feeling guilty and entered a government
witness-protection program.
He left the
protection program when Duterte became president, fearing he would be
killed, and said he decided to surface now "so the killings will stop."
Matobato's testimony set off a tense exchange between pro-Duterte and opposition senators.
Sen.
Alan Peter Cayetano accused Matobato of being part of a plot to unseat
Duterte. "I'm testing to see if you were brought here to bring down this
government," he said.
De Lima eventually declared Cayetano "out of order" and ordered Senate security personnel to restrain him.
Another
senator, former national police chief Panfilo Lacson, warned Matobato
that his admissions that he was involved in killings could land him in
jail.
"You can be jailed with your revelations," Lacson said. "You have no immunity."
Duterte
has immunity from lawsuits as a president, but de Lima said that
principle may have to be revisited now. "What if a leader is elected and
turns out to be a mass murderer?" de Lima asked in a news conference
after the tense Senate hearing.
