This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Philippine police officers played a "wheel of torture" game at a secret detention facility near Manila as a way to extract information from suspects – and also to have fun, the government's human rights commission said on Tuesday.

Loretta Ann Rosales, the commission chair, said she was horrified by the discovery of the torture scheme, more than three decades after the Philippines emerged from a brutal dictatorship.

Thousands of victims during the reign of Ferdinand Marcos won a class action suit in Hawaii against his estate for torture and other rights violations in 1992. Marcos was ousted in a peaceful 1986 "people power" revolt.

Under the game, detainees – mostly suspected drug traffickers – were punched if the "torture wheel" stopped at "20 seconds Manny Pacman," referring to a nickname of the Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiáo, or hung upside down if it stopped at a punishment called "30-second bat," said Amnesty International, the London-based rights group, which called the practice despicable.

"It's horrible," Rosales, who was a torture victim under Marcos, said of the game. "They do it for fun, it's like a game for entertainment.

"We're trying to correct this mindset based on a human rights approach to policing but obviously it may take a lot of time," she said, adding that she had discussed the torture allegations with senior police officials.

President Benigno Aquino III, the son of revered pro-democracy icons who fought Marcos, has pledged to take steps to prosecute violators of human rights. Rights groups, however, say violations have continued with impunity.

A picture of the multicoloured wheel provided by the human rights commission showed several other torture selections, including "3 minutes zombies" and "30-second duck walk/ferris wheel" but it was not immediately clear how those punishments were carried out.

"For police officers to use torture 'for fun' is despicable," Amnesty International's Hazel Galang-Folli said. "These are abhorrent acts. Suspending officers is not enough. Errant police personnel and their commanding officers should be held accountable in a court of law."

The group called on Aquino's administration to act immediately to put an end to routine torture.

A national police spokesman, Senior Superintendent Reuben Theodore Sindac, said several officers had been taken into custody and an investigation was under way.