This Head of State Claims He Personally Killed Criminals Before Becoming President

While presidential candidates across the globe continue to spout their rhetoric against the ‘others’, hoping to win their elections on the ‘intolerance sentiment’, here is one sitting President who not only encouraged extra-judicial killings but claimed to have personally done it in the past!

Not unlike the American President elect Donald Trump the Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is no stranger to controversy. His often exaggerated rhetoric caused quite a stir in the recent past when he openly defied President Obama and more recently claimed that Donald Trump had praised his war or drugs.

Philippines has a serious drug problem; and to combat this, police has often been accused by Human Rights observers of violations by killing drug peddlers, users and criminals.

According to some reports the police force has formed special squads to hunt down and kill these undesirables. These extra-judicial killings are supposedly ‘laid out’ in a way to show them as vigilante killings.

If this was not bad enough already, the highest office in the country has not only come out in support of these killings but has further claimed that he too had been a vigilante in the past, when despite being the Mayor he had personally killed several ‘criminals’.

His Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II was quick to play down his remarks and named them as efforts to get the message across to criminals. “The president always resorts to hyperbole; he always exaggerates just to put his message across,” Aguirre told reporters.

Unfazed by international concern

Duterte previously has both denied and acknowledged his involvement in the Davao death squads. Since taking his bloody anti-crime campaign to the nation level, he has been criticised by the United States and United Nations, whose concerns have only drawn angry rebukes.

Duterte’s speech at the presidential palaceIf they say that I am afraid to stop because of the human rights and guys … including Obama, sorry, I am not about to do that...