Philippine President Duterte’s Former Economic Adviser was a “Drug Lord,” Says Affidavit in New ICC Case - OCCRP
▻https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/philippine-president-dutertes-former-economic-adviser-was-a-drug-lord-says-af
Duterte has, since 2016, spearheaded a merciless ‘war on drugs’ that critics say is merely cover for widespread unlawful killings of thousands of Filipinos.
In mid-September, the ICC opened an investigation into the campaign. Human Rights Watch has said the killings “could amount to crimes against humanity.” The Duterte administration has said it will not cooperate with the investigation.
The recent testimony to the ICC, which contributed to its decision to open an investigation, comes from Arturo Lascañas, who says he was a member of the “Davao Death Squad,” an elite police unit formed in 1988 and allegedly controlled by Duterte during his two-decade mayorship of Davao City on the island of Mindanao.
His account describes hundreds of extrajudicial killings carried out by the squad while Duterte was mayor, years before he became president and launched his bloody nationwide anti-drug crackdown.
The 186-page affidavit, submitted to the ICC in 2020 and obtained by Rappler, repeatedly names Duterte associate Michael Yang as the coordinator of a network of methamphetamine labs in Mindanao in the early 2000s.
A separate intelligence report from 2017 by a former anti-narcotics policeman also says that Yang, a Chinese national active in business in the Philippines, ran drug labs. Lascañas’s affidavit is the first independent corroboration of the detailed claims in that report.