President Duterte admitted yesterday killing three people when he was mayor of Davao City – all of them hostage-takers. “I killed about three of them… I didn’t really know how many bullets from my gun went through their bodies,” he said, citing a hostage-taking incident that was covered by the media and which he said had endangered the victims’ lives.
Duterte made the admission even as he said in his speech before some 7,000 members in Singapore of the Filipino community here that he had no record of how many people he had killed, and that it was better if they just look at the records of funeral parlors. The President’s statements came on the same day that the White House expressed unease over his claim that he had personally killed criminals.
A remorseless Duterte said there is no need to apologize for his strong approach to fighting illegal drugs, and reiterated there would be no letup in the bloody war. “For as long as there are drug lords, this campaign will go on until the last day of my term, and until all of them are killed, may I emphasize that,” he said as he warned drug dealers, “I would not have any second thoughts about cutting your head off… You have already destroyed so many… Should I allow it to continue? And be like the Latin American states?”
Duterte,
71, has made reviving the death penalty in the mainly Catholic nation
his top legislative priority as part of a brutal war on crime that has
killed 5,300 people. "There
was death penalty before but nothing happened. Return that to me and I
would do it every day: five or six (criminals). That's for real,"
Duterte said Saturday.
An official at the influential Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines said the Church "totally opposed" Duterte's plan. "The
Philippines will be viewed as very barbaric," Father Jerome Secillano,
executive secretary at its public affairs office, told AFP. "It's going to make the Philippines the capital of death penalty in the world."
The
Philippines abolished the death penalty in 2006 following fierce
opposition to the penalty from the Catholic Church, the religion of 80
percent of Filipinos. Before
assuming office in June, Duterte vowed to introduce executions by
hanging, saying he did not want to waste bullets and believed snapping
the spinal cord was more humane than a firing squad. Duterte has said he viewed the death penalty not as a means to deter crime but for retribution. Duterte's allies in the House of Representatives quickly pushed for the bill and said they would vote on it by January.
The
United Nations' human rights chief, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, said in a
letter to the Philippine congress this month that reviving the death
penalty would violate the country's international obligations.
But on Saturday Duterte insisted executions were necessary to fight the drug scourge which he said was "destroying" the nation. While his aides dismiss his incendiary statements as hyperbole, rights advocates said Duterte's remarks were alarming. "Setting
a quota for executions is just too much. One death is too much because
we are talking about lives," Amnesty International Philippines vice
chairman Romeo Cabarde told AFP.
Catholic
leaders and rights defenders have instead urged the government to
reform a slow and corrupt justice system which they said was likely to
send innocent people to death row.
Secillano
said bishops planned to dissuade lawmakers from voting for the death
penalty and would attend congressional debates next month. "The death penalty is a shortcut. The government doesn't want to go through any process to fix the penal system," he said.
Reference:https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/philippines-duterte-warns-us-tit-tat-response-182724445.html
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