A former police general who oversaw the bloodiest years of the Philippines deadly campaign against drugs shrugged off the killing of a three-year-old girl by police in a sting operation, on Thursday saying that the world was not perfect and “shit happens.”
Philippine Senator Ronald dela Rosa, who once led the crackdown that has killed thousands of mostly poor urban drug users and peddlers, said that “collateral damage” was inevitable, referring to Sunday’s killing of toddler Myka Ulpina in a province near Manila.
Police said that she was used as a human shield by her father, a suspected drug dealer who resisted arrest and opened fire.
The girl’s mother has rejected that version of events.
“We are living in an imperfect world,” Dela Rosa told a news conference. “Would a police officer want to shoot a child? Never, because they have children as well, but shit happens during operations.”
Separately on Thursday, activists said that more than two dozen countries formally called for a UN investigation into Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s crackdown.
Their draft resolution marks the first time that the UN Human Rights Council has been asked to address what 11 UN rights experts last month said was “a staggering number of unlawful deaths and police killings,” which the government had shown no interest in investigating.
Duterte’s spokesman had called that “outrageous interference” by “foreign propagandists.”
Duterte’s critics have said that his three-year campaign has been a failure, intended to create shock and fear and burnish his tough image without making a dent on big narcotics syndicates.
Allegations of police cover-ups, summary executions and the planting of drugs and guns have been widespread.
Police have rejected the allegations and said that all of the more than 6,000 people they say they have killed were all armed and had all resisted arrest during official, sanctioned operations.
Activists have said that the drug-related killings could be closer to 27,000.
Philippine National Police spokesman Bernard Banac said that officers involved in the child’s killing were suspended pending an impartial investigation to determine which firearm killed her.
He reiterated the police version that the girl’s father pulled a gun first.
“It cannot be helped if there was an accident ... if he used his daughter as a human shield,” he said.
Lawyers and activists slammed Dela Rosa and said that a day of reckoning would come for police who killed illegally.
“This is not ‘shit happens.’ This happens when gov’t dispenses justice from guns instead of courts,” Jose Manuel Diokno, a lawyer who has mounted legal challenges to Duterte’s crackdown, said on Twitter.
Carlos Conde, Philippines researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch, said that Dela Rosa had shown “an uncaring, even contemptuous attitude” toward the child’s killing.
“Dela Rosa should be reminded that he, too, will answer for his complicity in the slaughter of thousands,” Conde said.
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