Philippine Vice President openly threatens to assassinate the President

Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte listens as she attends a joint committee hearing of the House of Representatives in Quezon City. File. | Photo Credit: AP

Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte On Saturday, November 23, 2024, he said that he had agreed with an assassin to kill the President, his wife and the Speaker of the House of Representatives if he was killed, and publicly threatened that it was not a joke.

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin referred the “active threat” to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to an elite force of presidential guards “for immediate appropriate action.” It was not immediately clear what action would be taken against the Vice President.

The Presidential Security Command immediately stepped up security for Mr. Marcos and said it treated the Vice President’s “publicly expressed threat” as a matter of national security.

The security force said it was “coordinating with law enforcement to detect, deter and defend against any threats to the president and the first family.”

Mr. Marcos ran alongside Ms. Duterte as a Vice Presidential candidate in the May 2022 elections, and both won with landslide victories on a call for a national unity campaign.

But the two leaders and their camps quickly fell into bitter disagreement over key differences, including their approaches to China’s aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea. Woman Duterte resigns from Marcos cabinet He took office as education minister and head of a counter-insurgency body in June.

Like his equally outspoken father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, the Vice President has been vocal in criticizing Mr. Marcos, his wife, Liza Araneta-Marcos, and the president’s ally and cousin, House Speaker Martin Romualdez, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and political . He has been persecuting the Duterte family and his close supporters.

His latest tirade began with a decision by House members allied with Romualdez and Marcos to arrest his chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who is accused of obstructing a congressional investigation into possible misuse of his budget as vice president and secretary of education. Lopez was later transferred to the hospital after falling ill and crying when she heard of the plan to temporarily lock herself in a women’s prison.

In a pre-dawn online news conference, an angry Sara Duterte accused Marcos of being incompetent as president and a liar, and her husband and the speaker of the House of Representatives with profanity-laden remarks.

When asked about concerns for his safety, the 46-year-old lawyer suggested there was an unspecified plot to kill him. “Don’t worry about my safety because I talked to someone. I said, ‘If I am killed, you will kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez.’ No joke, no joke,” the vice president said, without elaborating or using the initials that many people use to call the president.

“I gave my order: ‘If I die, don’t stop until I kill them.’ And he said ‘yes,'” the Vice President said.

Under the Philippine penal code, such public statements may constitute the crime of threatening to do injustice to a person or their family, punishable by imprisonment and a fine.

Amid political divisions, army chief General Romeo Brawner issued a statement assuring that the 160,000-member Armed Forces of the Philippines would be non-partisan “with the utmost respect for our democratic institutions and civil authority.”

“We urge you to remain calm and determined,” Brawner said. “We reiterate that we, as Filipinos, must stand together against those who seek to sever our ties.”

The Vice President is the daughter of Marcos’ predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte. Following an anti-drug crackdown by the police when he was mayor, Duterte, as president, killed thousands of mostly minor drug suspects in murders investigated by the International Criminal Court. It is considered a possible crime against humanity.

The former President denied that extrajudicial killings were authorized under the pressure he exerted, but made contradictory statements. He told a Philippine Senate public inquiry last month that he formed a “death squad” of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of the southern city of Davao.