The
Philippines' police chief on Friday stood by anti-narcotics officers and
rejected a Reuters investigation that pointed to a pattern of police sending
corpses of drug
suspects to hospitals to destroy crime scene evidence and hide
executions.
President
Rodrigo Duterte took office in the Philippines a year ago, launching a bloody
war on drugs that has killed thousands of Filipinos.
In a
television interview to mark the anniversary, Philippine National Police (PNP)
chief Ronald dela Rosa appeared irritated by questions about the Reuters
report, published on Thursday, and said police carrying out anti-drugs
operations had a duty to save lives, even when encountering violent resistance.
He said
police were not medically qualified to determine whether a victim was dead or
alive and sent victims to hospital as part of operational procedure.
"What
do you want, we let the wounded die? You don't want us to rescue his
life?" he told news channel ANC.
The Reuters
investigation analyzed crime data from two of Metro Manila's five police
districts and included accounts of doctors, witnesses, law enforcement
officials and victims' families. [nL8N1JQ2NQ]
It showed a
pattern of police sending dead bodies to hospitals, preventing thorough crime
scene investigations from taking place after the killing of drug suspects.
[nL8N1JQ2NQ]
Dela Rosa
said Reuters, which has produced a series of in-depth reports into the war on
drugs that have questioned official accounts, was "looking for
faults" in the police.
"PNP is
damned if you do, damned if you don't. Reuters really is looking for faults in
us. We have to stand by our police operational procedure that in case of an
encounter, if a person is not yet declared dead by the physician, you need to
bring him to the hospital."
He added:
"Who are the policemen to say they are dead? They are not medical
practitioners. If we did not bring them to the hospitals, the relatives might
sue us."
A
spokeswoman for Reuters said the news agency stood by its reporting.
Duterte's
bloody campaign has been condemned by human rights groups and alarmed Western
countries due to the high death toll and allegations of systematic extrajudicial
killings and cover-ups by police. The PNP rejects those allegations.
FEW
SURVIVORS
Reuters
looked at police reports covering the first eight months of the drug war, which
showed that in Quezon City Police District and neighboring Manila Police District,
301 victims were sent to hospital after police anti-drug operations. Only two
survived and the rest were dead on arrival.
In nearly
all cases where drug suspects have died during police operations in the
year-long crackdown, the official accounts say police fired in self defense.
Police say they do not shoot to kill.
Activists,
however, say the circumstances behind many of the killings in police sting
operations point to executions. A Reuters investigation last year found that
when police opened fire in anti-drug operations, they killed 97 percent of
people they shot.
The data
analyzed in the latest Reuters investigation shows a sharp increase in the
number of drug suspects declared dead on arrival in the Quezon City and Manila
districts each month.
There were
10 cases when the drug war started a year ago in July 2016, or 13 percent of
police drug shooting deaths. By January 2017, the tally rose to 51 cases, or 85
percent, at a time when criticism of Duterte's campaign intensified.
A police
commander who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said the increase was
no coincidence and police were
trying to
prevent crime scene investigations and media attention that might show they
were executing suspects.
Human rights
groups say the anti-drugs crackdown, the signature policy of the populist
Duterte, has been disastrous and has almost entirely targeted the poor, with
most of those killed or arrested drug users and small-time dealers, with
narcotics kingpins largely untouched.
Dela Rosa
said police should not be disparaged for trying to save victims and the removal
of bodies from a crime scene did not mean a proper investigation could not be
carried out.
"Do not
put malice in what the police does," he said. "The
crime scene
is there even without the dead body."
REUTERS
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