MANILA — Philippine police shot dead four suspected drug dealers while unknown men gunned down two others, officials said Saturday, raising the death toll for narcotics suspects to 14 this week after president-elect Rodrigo Duterte vowed a war against crime.
Police killed eight other suspects in the country’s north including two in Manila during the past week as civil rights monitors warned the government against taking illegal shortcuts to fight crime.
Authorities have insisted the drug suspects were killed lawfully, with the officers firing back after being shot at during separate raids.
Four more drugs suspects were shot in the southern city of General Santos late Thursday after they fired at undercover police during a sting operation, regional police spokesman Superintendent Romeo Galgo said on Saturday.
“The suspects were wounded and were brought to (hospital) but were all declared dead on arrival by the attending physician,” Galgo said in a written report.
He did not report any police casualties in what he described as a short firefight.
Duterte, the long-time mayor of the southern city of Davao, won the May 9 presidential election in a landslide largely on a pledge to roll out his city’s law-and-order policies nationally.
The controversial and acid-tongued politician captivated millions of Filipinos, and enraged his critics, with vows of ruthless tactics to end crime within six months.
The mayor warned security forces would kill tens of thousands of criminals and ignore human rights as he eradicated the scourge of drugs that many voters rated as their top concern.
Duterte’s campaign threats were backed by his rule in Davao, where he has been accused of running or tolerating death squads that killed more than 1,000 suspects.
He takes office on June 30. Davao police reported Saturday that unknown gunmen shot and killed two suspected drug dealers this week.
Man arrested after five die at Philippines rave
Philippine authorities arrested a man Saturday who allegedly sold illegal drugs at a Manila rave earlier this month where five people died from suspected overdoses, an official said.
Autopsies of three of the May 21 victims confirmed they died from heart attacks, but toxicologists have begun testing the corpses for a cocktail of illegal substances, including MDMA.
“Taking these pills together with alcohol... may lead to a heart attack,” Joel Tuvera, chief of the National Bureau of Investigation’s anti-narcotics division, told a news conference. The five victims collapsed and died as some 14,000 people attended the the open-air concert headlined by Belgian DJ duo Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike. Among the fatalities was a 33-year-old foreign man, believed to be from the US, police said.
Officers arrested the suspect Joshua Habalo in a sting operation early Saturday after an informant identified him as one of up to 10 people who sold illegal drugs at the rave, Tuvera added. The suspect was nabbed at an event at a Manila hotel that he had organized, Tuvera said.
At the party Habalo allegedly sold an undercover agent five ecstasy pills and was carrying other suspected narcotics, including cocaine, Tuvera said. Police are continuing to search for the nine other unidentified suspects, he added.
On Thursday Duterte described the concert deaths as “unacceptable”, blaming them on drugs. “It was a deadly mix intended to kill people,” he said. “When you mix downers with uppers and put it in the brain of a human being that is what happens.”
