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Former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte has told a Senate inquiry that he had maintained a “death squad” of criminals to kill other criminals when he was the mayor of a southern Philippine city. Mr Duterte, however, denied authorising police to gun down thousands of suspects in a bloody crackdown on illegal drugs he had ordered as president and which is the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court as a possible crime against humanity. The 79-year-old attended the televised inquiry in his first public appearance since his term ended in 2022. The Senate is looking into the drug killings under Mr Duterte, which were unprecedented in their scale in recent Philippine history. Mr Duterte acknowledged without elaborating that he once maintained a death squad of seven “gangsters” to deal with criminals when he was the long-serving Davao city mayor, before he became president. “I can make the confession now if you want,” Mr Duterte said. “I had a death squad of seven, but they were not policemen, they were also gangsters. “I’ll ask a gangster to kill somebody. ‘If you will not kill (that person), I will kill you now.'”
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