Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on crime is spiralling out of control, a top human rights lawyer and opposition lawmakers said Friday after police confirmed killing more than 100 people.
Duterte won the May 9 election by landslide largely on a pledge to kill tens of thousands of narcotics suspects and other criminals, and has urged the police and civilians to help in the killings.
“President Duterte’s war on crime has spawned a nuclear explosion of violence that is spiralling out of control and creating a nation without judges, without law, and without reason,” Free Legal Assistance Group chairman Jose Manuel Diokno said.
Diokno, also a prominent law professor, likened the killings to the actions of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, accused of killing thousands of dissidents during a 20-year rule that ended in 1986.
Police said Thursday that they had killed 103 drug suspects who resisted arrest, but insisted they had operated within the boundaries of the law.
“They put in danger the lives of our police officers who then had to defend themselves,” police spokesman Dionaldo Carlos said.
About 10 criminal suspects had been killed by police or suspected vigilantes each day since Duterte took his oath of office, according to a running tally by the Philippine Daily Inquirer newspaper.
Forty-three were killed as part of police operations, while 29 others, five of them yet to be identified, were victims of “vigilante-style killings”, it added.
Among the dead was a policeman found tied to a post Thursday with a cardboard sign hanging from his chest that accused him of being a “police drug pusher”. A photo of the victim was published on the paper’s front page on Friday.
Police in nearby Bulacan province said he had been under surveillance on suspicion of ties with drug gangs.
“That was the life he chose, so there’s no one to blame for his fate,” the provincial police chief, Senior Superintendent Romeo Caramat, told Manila television network ABS-CBN in an interview.
Duterte, who during the election campaign said 100,000 people would die in his war on crime, on Thursday threatened an alleged drug dealer with death if he returned to the Philippines.
“The moment he steps out of the plane, he will die,” Duterte said on national television.
Duterte also named two jailed drug dealers who he said continued to distribute illegal drugs from inside their cells.
“My appeal to them is that, since they are beyond redemption, they can stop and commit suicide because I will not allow these idiots to run their show,” he added.
House of Representatives member Teddy Baguilat said the president’s rhetoric “breeds a culture of violence and culture of retribution”.
Baguilat and Senator Leila de Lima, who served as justice minister in the previous government, both told AFP on Friday they had asked Congress to investigate the killings.
“The killings are on the rise, and there are just telltale signs of summary executions in a number of them,” de Lima said.
Nine people were killed overnight in the Philippines, authorities said Saturday, as police and suspected anti-drug gunmen pushed ahead with President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial war on crime.
One pre-dawn raid in the town of Matalam, about 900 kilometres (600 miles) south of Manila, left eight “drug personalities” dead Saturday, including a woman, regional police spokesman Superintendent Romeo Galgo told reporters.
One other person was arrested on suspicion of drug offences, Galgo said, adding that three pistols and four grenades were found on the dead suspects.
In Manila, police said they found a yet to be identified dead man, his entire head wrapped in tape, on a poorly lit road late Friday.
His torso was covered with a cardboard sign reading: “I Am A Pusher”.
Civil rights campaigners including two legislators called Friday for an enquiry into recent months’ police operations amid concerns at least some of the dead suspects could have been summarily executed by the lawmen.
Police have said they had operated within the boundaries of the law in killing 103 suspects between May 10 and July 7.
The Manila newspaper Philippine Daily Inquirer‘s own “kill list” of suspected criminals showed 119 victims of suspected summary killings up until July 7, including 13 unidentified ones, since the elections.
