HUMAN rights activists in the Philippines have condemned President Rodrigo Duterte for urging soldiers to shoot women in the vagina to render them “useless.”

Mr Duterte made the comments to 200 former Maoist rebels in Malacanang last week, saying of female Maoist fighters: “Tell the soldiers: ‘There’s a new order coming from the mayor [Mr Duterte]. We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina’.”

The government later censored the official transcript to remove the Visayan word for vagina.

Campaign group Karapatan said yesterday that Mr Duterte had “distinguished himself as a frothing-in-the-mouth fascist who incites the worst violations of international humanitarian law.”

House of Representatives member Emmi de Jesus said his words furthered “impunity” and took “state terrorism against women and the people to a whole new level.”

During his election campaign in 2016, Mr Duterte “joked” about a 1989 prison riot in which an Australian missionary was raped and murdered, saying that he should have been the first to rape her.

“I was angry because … the mayor [Mr Duterte] should have been first.”