Duterte’s ‘anti-Sparrow death squads’ illegal, suspicious — De Lima

President Rodrigo Duterte and Sen. Leila de Lima. (File photo from Philippine Daily Inquirer)Detained opposition Senator Leila de Lima on Thursday said President Rodrigo Duterte’s plan to organize a death squad to counter the New People’s Army’s “Sparrow Unit” is illegal. 

Detained opposition Senator Leila de Lima on Thursday said President Rodrigo Duterte’s plan to organize a death squad to counter the New People’s Army’s “Sparrow Unit” is illegal.

“Death squads are basically an instrument of repression. They are illegal by definition,” De Lima said in a dispatch from her detention unit in Camp Crame, Quezon City.

The fierce critic of Duterte said this is the reason why the “PNP death squads under Duterte take all the trouble to mask their operations with the ‘nanlaban’ narrative.”

According to De Lima, even police operations where they go out “to hunt and kill alleged suspected criminals is still murder and therefore illegal.”

De Lima said Duterte’s plan on establishing death squads“cannot be taken lightly as another joke.”

“A death squad or squads especially organized to fight the NPA is a further legitimization of summary executions by this government,” she pointed out.

She said NPA’s Sparrow Units were already a “thing of the past, and are no longer existing” thus, “organization of ‘anti-Sparrow’ death squads all the more suspicious.” /kga

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