“The affidavit is hearsay unless subjected to cross examination,” Roque said in a text message to reporters. Harry Roque, a spokesperson for Duterte, dismissed the claims.
The testimony also concludes that Duterte and his son Paolo Duterte worked with Yang and other Chinese businessmen in Davao in the illegal drug trade. Duterte has said he first met Yang in 1999. The evidence in Lascañas’s ICC testimony and the police intelligence report suggests that Duterte and Yang may have had drug connections going back to the early 2000s, when Duterte was still mayor. Yang spent a year as Duterte’s presidential economic advisor in 2018, and under Duterte both he and Lin have emerged from obscurity to secure lucrative business contracts, broker deals for major capital investments, partner with Chinese state-owned enterprises, and take key roles in associations devoted to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a giant infrastructure strategy being pushed around the globe. Yang and his business partner Lin Weixiong – who was also linked to narcotics in the 2017 police intelligence report – have risen to prominence in the Philippines since Duterte became president.
Lascañas’s affidavit is the first independent corroboration of the detailed claims in that report. The 186-page affidavit, submitted to the ICC in 2020 and obtained by Rappler, repeatedly names Duterte associate Michael Yang as the coordinator of a network of methamphetamine labs in Mindanao in the early 2000s.Ī separate intelligence report from 2017 by a former anti-narcotics policeman also says that Yang, a Chinese national active in business in the Philippines, ran drug labs. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, notorious for a brutal crackdown under the auspices of a war on drugs, holds a Galil sniper rifle in 2018. His account describes hundreds of extrajudicial killings carried out by the squad while Duterte was mayor, years before he became president and launched his bloody nationwide anti-drug crackdown. The recent testimony to the ICC, which contributed to its decision to open an investigation, comes from Arturo Lascañas, who says he was a member of the “Davao Death Squad,” an elite police unit formed in 1988 and allegedly controlled by Duterte during his two-decade mayorship of Davao City on the island of Mindanao. Human Rights Watch has said the killings “could amount to crimes against humanity.” The Duterte administration has said it will not cooperate with the investigation.
In mid-September, the ICC opened an investigation into the campaign. A Senate committee has since said that Yang could face charges including perjury or false testimony.Įxplosive new testimony at the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleges that a close associate of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has long-standing ties to the narcotics trade.ĭuterte has, since 2016, spearheaded a merciless ‘war on drugs’ that critics say is merely cover for widespread unlawful killings of thousands of Filipinos.