By Mario Casayuran

Senator Richard J. Gordon said on Saturday he disagreed with President Duterte telling Police Lt. Jovie Espenido that was free to kill all those who would dare cross the line in his vaunted anti-illegal drugs campaign.

Gordon, however, said the usual ‘’kill’’ word in the President’s language was his usual way of scaring those in involved in the multi-billion-peso illegal drugs trade.

“Iba klase si Presidente,’’ Gordon, chairman of the Senate Blue Ribbon, and Justice and Human Rights Committees, told Senate reporters Friday when he revealed that his committee had recommended to the Department of Justice (DOJ) the criminal investigation of Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Oscar D. Albayalde (on terminal leave) and 13 “ninja cops” in the drug recycling scandal in Mexico, Pampanga in 2013. (He is different.)

‘’You don’t mean that, do you? (If it is), that is wrong,’’ Gordon said, a statement apparently addressed to the President.

‘’I don’t agree with it. Magingat lang tayo. You might fall on hour own sword. I don’t have to agree with everything he says. Di ako nagpapaguwapo. (Let us be careful. By saying out loud, I will be doing my duty as friend,’’ he added.

Gordon recalled wincing when the President, before Russian officials in his recent state visit to Russia, saying ‘’I will kill you if you bring drugs to my people.’’

That was the President’s way of scaring the daylights out of Russian businessmen, he pointed out.

President Duterte recently told newly appointed Bacolod city police chief Espenido that he was free to kill those who cross the line in his anti-illegal drugs campaign.

Espenido was previously involved in high-profile drug operations that left two town mayors in the Visayas dead.

‘’Bacolod is badly hit [by drugs] now. I placed Espenido there. I said, ‘Go there and you are free to kill everybody. Son of a b****, start killing there. The two of us will then go to jail’,” Duterte said in a mix of Filipino and English in a speech before business leaders in Manila last Thursday.

Despite warnings that he could be prosecuted for his public pronouncements about killing drug suspects and for the deadly war on drugs, Duterte has repeatedly taunted the international community and human rights groups.

The president had also declared that he does “not care about human rights”, and issued a “shoot-to-kill” order if drug suspects resist arrest.

READ MORE: Duterte admits giving Espenido ‘license to kill’