Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has told a Senate inquiry that he had maintained a “death squad” of criminals to kill other criminals when he was the mayor of a southern Philippine city.

Mr Duterte, however, denied authorising police to gun down thousands of suspects in a bloody crackdown on illegal drugs he had ordered as president and which is the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court as a possible crime against humanity.

The 79-year-old attended the televised inquiry in his first public appearance since his term ended in 2022. The Senate is looking into the drug killings under Mr Duterte, which were unprecedented in their scale in recent Philippine history.

Mr Duterte acknowledged without elaborating that he once maintained a death squad of seven “gangsters” to deal with criminals when he was the long-serving Davao city mayor, before he became president.

“I can make the confession now if you want,” Mr Duterte said. “I had a death squad of seven, but they were not policemen, they were also gangsters.

Mr Duterte leans over to speak to a representative
Mr Duterte answered questions over his so-called war on drugs (AP)

“I’ll ask a gangster to kill somebody. ‘If you will not kill (that person), I will kill you now.'”

Senator Aquilino Pimentel III, who was overseeing the inquiry, and Senator Risa Hontiveros pressed Mr Duterte to provide more details, but the former president responded in unclear terms, adding that he would explain further in the next hearing.

Often cursing during the hearing, Mr Duterte said he would take full responsibility for the killings that happened while he was president from 2016 to 2022. But he said he never ordered his national police chiefs, who also attended the inquiry, to undertake extrajudicial killings.

“Did I ever tell you to kill any criminal?” Mr Duterte asked his former police chiefs. They included Ronald Dela Rosa, the current senator who first enforced Duterte’s campaign against illegal drugs as his national police chief.

“No, Mr president,” Mr Dela Rosa responded.

Former Senator Leila de Lima, one of the most vocal critics of Mr Duterte who once investigated the drug killings in Davao, said there was adequate evidence and witnesses of the extrajudicial killings but they were scared of testifying against Mr Duterte.

Rodrigo Duterte raises his hand to make an oath
Mr Duterte denied ordering police to kill drug dealers (AP)

Ms de Lima was arrested early on in Mr Duterte’s presidency on drug charges she said were fabricated to stop her from proceeding with her Senate investigation. She was cleared of the charges and released after more than six years of detention last year.

“This man, the former mayor of Davao city and the former president of the Republic of the Philippines, for so long has evaded justice and accountability,” said Ms de Lima, sitting near the former president.

“We have not made him to account after all these years,” she said, and added that witnesses could now surface and help prosecute Duterte and his associates.

Mr Duterte sounded defiant through the hearing.

“If I’m given another chance, I’ll wipe all of you,” Mr Duterte said of drug dealers and criminals, who he added had resumed their criminal actions after he stepped down from the presidency.

One of Asia’s most unorthodox contemporary leaders, Mr Duterte ended his turbulent six-year term in June 2022, closing out more than three decades in the country’s often-rowdy politics, where he built a political name for his expletives-laced outbursts and disdain for human rights and the West while reaching out to China and Russia.

Activists regarded him as “a human rights calamity,” not only for the widespread deaths under his so-called war on drugs but also for his brazen attacks on critical media, the dominant Catholic church and political opposition.