Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte on Saturday said she has contracted an assassin to kill the Philippine president, his wife and the House of Representatives speaker if she herself is killed, in a brazen public threat that she warned was not a joke.
Philippine Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin referred to the “active threat” against Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to an elite presidential guards force “for immediate proper action.” It was not immediately clear what actions would be taken against Duterte.
The Philippine Presidential Security Command boosted Marcos’ security and said it considered Duterte’s threat, which was “made so brazenly in public,” a national security issue.
Photo: AP
The presidential security force said it was “coordinating with law enforcement agencies to detect, deter and defend against any and all threats to the president and the first family.”
Duterte, a lawyer, later tried to walk back her remarks and said they were not an actual threat, but only an expression of concern over an unspecified threat to her own life.
“If I expressed the concern, they will say that’s a threat to the life of the president?” she said.
“Why would I kill him if not for revenge from the grave? There is no reason for me to kill him. What’s the benefit for me?” Duterte told journalists.
Under the Philippine penal code, such public remarks could constitute a crime of threatening to inflict a wrong on a person or their family and is punishable by a jail term and fine.
The Philippine constitution states that if a president dies, sustains a permanent disability, is removed from office or resigns, the vice president takes over and serves the rest of the term.
Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in the May 2022 elections and both won with landslide victories on a campaign call of national unity.
However, the two leaders and their camps rapidly had a bitter falling-out over key differences, including in their approaches to China’s aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea.
Duterte resigned from the Marcos Cabinet in June as Philippine secretary of education and head of the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, an anti-insurgency body formed during the administration of her father, former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte.
Her latest tirade was set off by the decision by House members allied with Romualdez and Marcos to detain her chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who was accused of hampering a congressional inquiry into the possible misuse of her budget as vice president and education secretary.
In a predawn online news conference, an angry Sara Duterte accused Marcos of incompetence as a president and of being a liar, along with his wife and the House speaker in expletives-laden remarks.
When asked about concerns over her security, the 46-year-old said there was an unspecified plot to kill her.
“I have talked to a person. I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM [Marcos], [first lady] Liza Araneta and [Speaker] Martin Romualdez. No joke. No joke,” she said.
“I said, do not stop until you kill them, and then he said yes,” she added.
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