This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The Philippines president, Rodrigo Duterte, ordered members of a death squad to kill criminals and opponents and even personally “finished off” a justice department employee with a submachine gun, a self-confessed former assassin has testified.

Edgar Matobato, 57, told a nationally televised senate committee hearing that he had heard Duterte order some of the assaults that left around 1,000 people dead from 1988 to 2013 in Davao city, where Duterte was mayor for more than two decades.

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The inquiry is being led by senator 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, who is known as both “the Punisher” and “Duterte Harry” for his bloody stance on fighting crime, has previously denied involvement in extra-judicial killings, but also made contradictory statements that he either condones or is even part of the vigilante group known as the Davao Death Squad.

The presidential spokesman Martin Andanar rejected Matobato’s accusation on Thursday, saying the government had investigated Duterte’s time as mayor. “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. The justice secretary, Vitaliano Aguirre, called the allegations “lies and fabrications”.

Matobato told the senate hearing that he had carried out about 50 of the killings, including that of a man who was fed to a crocodile in 2007. “I didn’t kill anyone unless ordered by Charlie Mike,” he said, telling the senate it was the vigilante squad’s code name for the then-mayor.

Matobato said he also was part of a group that in 1993 were stopped on a road by an agent from the justice department’s National Bureau of Investigation, leading to a shootout. Duterte arrived at the scene, Matobato said, and killed the man.

“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.”

“Our job was to kill criminals, rapists, [drug] pushers and snatchers. That’s what we did. We killed people almost on a daily basis,” he added.

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Matobato said the killings started in 1988 and continued to 2013, when he tried to leave the death squad. His associates then attempted to implicate him criminally in one killing, he added.

The victims included petty criminals and opponents of Duterte’s family, including a billionaire hotelier from central Cebu province who was killed in 2014. Matobato said that man was murdered because he had a feud with Duterte’s son over a woman.



Duterte’s son, Paolo Duterte, said Matobato was “a madman” and described his testimony as “mere hearsay”.

Matobato said he had also killed and chopped up another victim, a suspected foreign terrorist who he said was buried in a quarry in 2002. Another victim was a Duterte critic and radio commentator, Jun Pala, who was killed by motorcycle-riding gunmen while walking home in 2003.

Following the bombing of a Roman Catholic cathedral in 1993, Matobato said, Duterte ordered him and his colleagues to launch attacks on mosques in Davao.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered a nationwide crackdown on drugs criminals. Since he became president in June 2016, more than 3,000 are thought to have died. Photograph: Bullit Marquez/AP

He said some victims were dropped into the sea with their stomachs cut open so the fish would eat them. “They were killed like chickens,” he said.

Matobato has since entered a government witness-protection program but left when Duterte became president, fearing he would be targeted. The hearing was at one point halted briefly so senators could discuss how to provide Matobato safety following his statement.

The shocking testimony led to senator Alan Peter Cayetano, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for vice-president as Duterte’s running mate, to accuse Matobato of being part of a plot to overthrow the president.

De Lima eventually told Cayetano, who was not a member of the committee, that he was abusing the time allotted to him.

The months-long hearing has mostly focused on Duterte’s time as head of state this year, revealing that more than 1,000 people have died in police operations since his election.

In the face of public criticism, Duterte 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.

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In the run-up to the May election that he won with significant margins, Duterte said the Philippines should build funeral parlours, not prisons, to cope with drug pushers in his time in office.

In 2009, Human Rights Watch released a report calling for the Philippines to dismantle highly organised vigilante gangs it said were directly linked to government officials and police in Davao, a city of 1.5 million where Duterte has been elected mayor seven times.

Duterte warned as mayor that criminals were a “legitimate target of assassination”, and Human Rights Watch said some victims had been killed after the mayor announced their names on local television.