By Clare Baldwin and Andrew R.C. Marshall
MANILA — The residents of Old Balara hid in their homes when gunfire erupted in their Manila district last September. They didn't see the police operation that killed seven drug suspects that night. But they witnessed the gory aftermath and it haunts them still.
That night, Herlina Alim said she watched police haul away the men's bodies, leaving trails of blood. "They were dragged down the alley like pigs," she said. Her neighbor Lenlen Magano said she saw three bodies, face down and motionless, piled at the end of the alley while police stood calmly by.
It was at least an hour, according to residents, before the victims were thrown into a truck and taken to hospital in what a police report said was a bid to save their lives. Old Balara's chief, the elected head of the district, told Reuters he was perplexed. They were already dead, Allan Franza said, so why take them to hospital?
An analysis of crime data from two of Metro Manila's five police districts and interviews with doctors, law enforcement officials and victims' families point to one answer: Police were sending corpses to hospitals to destroy evidence at crime scenes and hide the fact that they were executing drug suspects.
Thousands of people have been killed since President Rodrigo Duterte took office on June 30 last year and declared war on what he called "the drug menace." Among them were the seven victims from Old Balara who were declared dead on arrival at hospital.
A Reuters analysis of police reports covering the first eight months of the drug war reveals hundreds of cases like those in Old Balara. In Quezon City Police District and neighboring Manila Police District, 301 victims were taken to hospital after police drug operations. Only two survived. The rest were dead on arrival.
The data also shows a sharp increase in the number of drug suspects declared dead on arrival in these two districts each month. There were 10 cases at the start of the drug war in July 2016, representing 13 percent of police drug shooting deaths. By January 2017, the tally had risen to 51 cases or 85 percent. The totals grew along with international and domestic condemnation of Duterte's campaign.
This increase was no coincidence, said a police commander in Manila, who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. In late 2016, he said, police began sending victims to hospitals to avoid crime scene investigations and media attention that might show they were executing drug suspects. A Reuters investigation last year found that when police opened fire in drug operations, they killed 97 percent of people they shot.
The Manila commander said police depended on emergency room doctors being too focused on the patients to care about why they were shot. The doctors "aren't asking any questions. They only record it: DOA," he said.
But five doctors told Reuters they were troubled by the rising number of police-related DOAs. Four said many drug suspects brought to hospital had been shot in the head and heart, sometimes at close range - precise and unsurvivable wounds that undermined police claims that suspects were injured during chaotic exchanges of gunfire.
Oscar Albayalde, Metro Manila's police chief, said he had never heard of officers taking dead suspects to hospital to cover up crime scenes. "We will have that investigated," he told Reuters. If that investigation showed police were "intentionally moving these dead bodies and bringing them to the hospitals just to alter the evidence, then I think we have to make them explain."
Duterte's office declined to expand on Albayalde's response to Reuters' questions.
According to police reports about the incidents, suspects shot during operations were "immediately rushed" to hospital. "The most important (thing) is the life of the person," said Randy Llanderal, a precinct commander in Quezon City. The police reports reviewed by Reuters showed Llanderal had led or joined operations in which 13 drug suspects ended up dead on arrival.
Llanderal said all suspects were shot in self-defense during legitimate operations.
The Manila police commander, a retired senior officer and some doctors believe there is a cover up.
Hospitalizing drug suspects who have been shot allows police to project a more caring image, said the Manila commander. The retired officer agreed. "It is basically a ploy to make the public believe that the police are mindful of the safety and survival of suspects," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Manila commander said his officers were instructed to shoot at "sensitive areas." Suspects who survived were shot again to finish them off or smothered with their own clothing, he said.
A Reuters examination of the Old Balara incident and similar operations also suggests that the purpose of hospital runs was to destroy evidence rather than save lives. Police manhandled gunshot victims and showed no urgency in getting them medical treatment, said three sets of family members and other witnesses.
Removing bodies makes it harder to work out what really happened. "You obliterate the crime scene — the evidence," said Rizaldy Rivera, an agent at the Philippines' National Bureau of Investigation who has investigated allegations of police brutality. Police forensic investigators at the scene, said Rivera, must carry out their work on what is effectively a "tampered crime scene."
Scene of Crime Operatives, or SOCO units as police forensic teams are called, process crime scenes and conduct autopsies. Aurelio Trampe, the police general who oversees SOCO, said police officers haven't been removing bodies to alter crime scenes. He said they have the discretion to disregard crime-scene investigative procedures "just as long as they could save lives."
SOCO can still collect evidence from bodies once they reach the hospital, but doesn't always do so. Instead, said SOCO forensic chief Reynaldo Calaoa, that task falls to a police investigator assigned to the case. That investigator often hails from the same station as the colleagues who killed the suspect.
Such practices can leave the system open to abuse, said Raquel Del Rosario Fortun, an independent forensic scientist and chair of the University of the Philippines Manila pathology department.
"They do the shooting, they do the killing — and they investigate themselves," she said. "Impunity, that's what's happening." — Reuters
