'I will eat you alive, raw': Philippines president issues savage threat to Islamic militants
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has vowed to personally tear apart and eat Abu Sayyaf Islamic militants, in a bloodthirsty vow of revenge for deadly attacks.
"They will pay. When the time comes, I will eat you in front of people," Duterte told an audience of Filipinos late on Monday night while in Laos for a regional summit.
"If you make me mad, in all honesty, I will eat you alive, raw."
Duterte often hurls abusive insults at critics and is waging a brutal war on crime in which nearly 3,000 people have been killed since he took office on June 30.
His aides often urge reporters against taking Duterte's comments literally, cautioning that the 71-year-old former lawyer speaks in a crude language of the people.
During the election campaign earlier this year Duterte attracted widespread criticism for saying he had wanted to rape a "beautiful" Australian missionary who had been sexually assaulted and murdered in a Philippine prison riot.
Duterte, 71, also claimed to keep two mistresses in cheap boarding houses who he took to short-stay hotels for sexual encounters.
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Duterte on Monday offered a particularly vivid description of how he would like to eat Abu Sayyaf militants, who killed 15 soldiers last month and are accused of a bombing in his home city last week that claimed 14 lives.
"I will really carve your torso open. Give me vinegar and salt and I will eat you. I'm not kidding," Duterte said, according to an official video of his speech posted on Tuesday.
"These guys are beyond redemption."
The Abu Sayyaf are a small band of Islamic militants based on remote southern islands of the mainly Catholic Philippines and are listed by the United States as a terrorist organisation.
They are notorious for kidnapping foreigners to extract ransoms, and this year beheaded two Canadian hostages.
Duterte's graphic threat comes as his increasingly notorious police chief, Ronald Dela Rosa, defending the Philippine's bloody crackdown on drug dealers, insisted 'we are not butchers' amid a mounting death toll.
Reuters reports the Philippines on Tuesday defended a surge in killings since Duterte became president over two months ago, handing out a 38-page pamphlet at a regional summit praising his campaign against illegal drugs.
"We are not butchers who just kill people for no apparent reason," reads one page of the booklet, citing the Philippines' feisty national police chief, Ronald Dela Rosa.
The pamphlet was distributed at a Southeast Asian and East Asian summit in Laos that was overshadowed on Tuesday by the cancellation of a meeting between Duterte and Barack Obama after he referred to the U.S. president as a "son of a bitch".
Duterte swept to power in May on promises to wipe out crime and corruption within six months, pledging to wage a war on drug dealers and crush widespread addiction to methamphetamines in the country of 100 million.
There has been popular support for Duterte's campaign but the killings have brought expressions of concern from the United States, a close Philippine ally, and the United Nations.
Dela Rosa, known as Bato in his home country (which translates to The Rock or The Stone) has built a reputation as Duterte's right-hand man in the bloody few months since he ascended to the presidency.
News Corp reports 'The Rock' and Duterte can trace their friendship back decades, and, if Dela Rosa's own words any any measure, Duterte has a strong ally in his campaign to kill drug dealers.
"You can kill them because you are the victims," Dela Rosa said last month.
"Go to them, pour gasoline on their houses and burn it down. Show them your anger... these people have long been getting rich. What about you? Your brains are getting small and melting."
- With AFP/Reuters
