LUCENA CITY—President Duterte is “mortally afraid that the New People’s Army (NPA) intends to apprehend, try and punish him for his grave crimes,” exiled communist leader Jose Maria “Joma” Sison said of the thick, bulletproof glass panel that shielded the President when he spoke on Thursday at a campaign sortie in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental.
‘I would be happy’
“I might be targeted from afar,” Duterte said of the glass panel. “I’m already 74 years old. If I die from an assassination bullet, how happy I would be. I am tired. I just want to leave,” he added at the campaign rally of Partido Demokratiko Pilipino-Lakas ng Bayan (PDP-Laban).
Last week, the President also spoke behind a bulletproof panel at the PDP-Laban rally in Malabon City, where he claimed that somebody wanted to kill him.
In a statement on Friday, Sison said that Duterte might have speculated that the Maoist-inspired guerillas were after him “to exact justice for his grave crimes of mass murder, tyranny, treason and corruption.”
In the Bacolod City campaign rally, the President seemed resigned to what he said were threats to his life. “If it’s your time, there’s nothing you can do about it,” Duterte said.
But the President said he would rather be felled by sniper fire rather than pass away due to illness or in his sleep.