Senator Leila de Lima on Tuesday said the bloody police raids in Ozamiz City that resulted in the deaths of Mayor Reynaldo Parojinog and 14 others were a “massacre” and a “plain and simple extermination” of President Rodrigo Duterte’s former comrades in vigilantism.

In a statement sent from her detention facility at Camp Crame, De Lima said it would be “naive” to believe that the raids on the Parojinogs’ compound were part of a regular law enforcement operation.

Apart from Mayor Parojinog, his wife Susan and brother- Provincial Board Member Octavio Parojinog- were killed during a two-hour clash with the police that ensued as authorities were trying to serve warrants to search their houses for loose firearms.

De Lima, a staunch critic of Duterte, said the President and the Parojinogs were “kindred spirits in the vigilante trade and brothers-in-arms in the network of Mindanao’s vigilante groups.” The senator has accused Duterte of being behind the so-called Davao Death Squad (DDS).

De Lima said vigilante groups in Mindanao - including the Kuratong Baleleng of the Parojinogs, the DDS, and the Ampatuan private army in Maguindanao - “one way or the other co-existed in an informal network of mafias.”

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“It is the fortune or misfortune of the Mindanao mafias — depending on which side of Duterte they find themselves in — that Duterte happened to become President, and now has exclusive access to the national State machinery’s means of coercion and violence,” De Lima said.

“Let us not fool ourselves. The massacre of the Parojinogs is not even street justice. It is the plain and simple extermination of former comrades in the cause of vigilantism who have outlived their relevance, now that one of them has captured State power,” she said.

De Lima also compared the Ozamiz raids to the Kuratong Baleleng rubout in 1995. The mayor's father, Octavio "Ongkoy" Parojinog Sr., was the founder of the Kuratong Baleleng, an anti-communist group that later on engaged in criminal activities, such as kidnap for ransom, robbery, extortion, among others.

“Twenty-two years after the original Kuratong Baleleng rub-out in 1995, some of our PNP officials still have not learned their lessons. Only painstaking police work and legitimate arrests and prosecution can put an end to notorious criminal organizations,” she said.

“Let us be clear about this:none of them deserve being murdered. They deserve to be brought to justice for all their crimes, but not being murdered in cold blood. Their being Mindanao's warlords and mafia bosses does not justify their murder. The Parojinogs and the Kuratong Baleleng’s crimes do not justify their murder, in the same way that Duterte's and his DDS’s crimes in Davao City do not justify his murder,” De Lima said. — MDM/KVD, GMA News