Bangkok: A confessed death squad member has testified that controversial Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the killings of criminals and political opponents and Muslims when he was mayor of the southern city of Davao.
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Edgar Motabato told a televised hearing of the Philippines Senate on Thursday that he was among members of a squad who took four of Mr Duterte's political rivals to the island of Samalin in 2010, where they were placed in sand and strangled.
"We cut the stomachs open and I loaded them onto the boat on the shore. We threw them out. Weighed them down with hollow blocks. Three for each person," he said.
Mr Motabato testified that he carried out abductions and deadly assaults, including feeding a man to a crocodile in 2007, when he was a member of a squad comprising police and soldiers who worked as ghost employees at Davao City under the guise of a "civil security unit".
He said that in 1993 Mr Duterte went to the unit's offices after the bombing of a Catholic cathedral in Davao and "issued the order to kill Muslims in the mosque".
Mr Motabato said that he threw a grenade into the Bangkerohan Mosque but nobody was hurt.
However Mr Duterete's spokesman denied Mr Motabato's claims and urged the public to maintain sobriety on the matter and a sense of objectivity.
And Karlo Alexie Nograles, a Davao City representative from a family that has opposed Mr Duterte, told reporters that "no supporters of ours or persons under our employ was ever killed due to politics."
"I don't know what this guy is talking about," he said, referring to Mr Motabato.
Mr Duterte, who was swept into the Philippines' highest office in May, has repeatedly denied any role in extra-judicial killings of criminals during 22 years as mayor of Davao when he became known as "The Punisher".
In 2012 the Philippines' Commission on Human Rights confirmed earlier reports, including by Human Rights Watch, of targeted and systematic killings in Davao, on the southern tip of Mindanao island.
The commission verified 206 out of 375 alleged killings between 2005 and 2009, most of them suspected criminals and many of them young men and teenagers.
Online news site Rappler said Mr Duterte once claimed ownership of a vigilante death squad in Davao but now insists there is no evidence linking him to it.
In May last year Mr Duterte, 71, told a national gathering of workplace advocates that Davao became the ninth-safest city in the world because of his approach to crime.
"How did I reach that title among the world's safest cities? Kill them all," he was reported as saying.
Since taking office on June 30, Mr Duterte's shoot-on-sight "war on drugs" has left more than 3400 Filipinos dead, an average of 47 per day.
"It seems there is a [kill] quota that needs to be met," said Senator Leila de Lima, who is chairing the Senate hearings and presented Mr Motabato to testify.
"Is this a safe society?" Ms De Lima said.
Over the past week a rash of anti-American outbursts made by Mr Duterte has shaken US allies in Asia, including Australia, raising doubts about his commitment to a US-led military alliance seeking to counter China's aggressive claims to the strategically important waterways of the South China Sea.
