Singapore: A Philippines politician accused of being an architect of the country’s deadly war on drugs has been holed up in the Senate for almost two days after running through the complex to get away from investigators seeking to ship him off to The Hague.
Extraordinary CCTV footage shows senator Ronald Dela Rosa, 64, and his entourage bolting through the parliamentary building’s hallways and stumbling up fire escapes, apparently to escape pursuers from the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI).
The officers were at the building on Monday afternoon to act on a freshly unsealed arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), but it remains unclear if they were actively chasing Dela Rosa through the complex or whether he and staff were spooked and dashed.
Either way, the panicked politician and his crew found sanctuary in the chamber, where he soon voted-in his ally Alan Peter Cayetano as the new Senate president.
Cayetano then vowed Dela Rosa would not be arrested inside the complex, and put it into lockdown to prevent the NBI officers leaving, alleging that they had been in contempt, according to news site Rappler.
If Dela Rosa chose to leave, however, the NBI may pursue him again, meaning he is effectively living in asylum inside the Senate.
Dela Rosa was still taking refuge there on Wednesday, according to a person inside the building. On Tuesday, hundreds of pro-and-anti demonstrators and crowd control police gathered outside.
The senator – popularly known as Bato, which means rock in Tagalog – was once the chief of police for former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, who was arrested in March last year and sent to the Netherlands to face charges in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity.
Rights groups claim as many as 30,000 people were killed, many of them by police, during Duterte’s tenures as the mayor of Davao City and, later, president. The case against him relates to 76 of the alleged murders.
The scenes at the Senate have gripped the Philippines. They were sparked when the ICC made the arrest warrant for Dela Rosa, a staunch Duterte ally, public after issuing it in secret in November last year. The ICC alleges Dela Rosa “committed the crime against humanity of murder … at least between 3 July 2016 and the end of April 2018, during which no less than 32 persons were killed”.
The affair is playing out amid a broader and similarly wild political battle between supporters of the Duterte family and those of sitting president Ferdinand Marcos Jr.
On the same day Dela Rosa ran through the senate, the Philippines lower house again impeached Vice President Sara Duterte, the former president’s daughter, for misusing public funds and publicly stating she had hired a contractor to kill Marcos Jr if she herself was assassinated.
The impeachment trial for the younger Duterte moves to Cayetano’s Senate, which is stacked with her family’s loyalists.
Monday was Dela Rosa’s first appearance in the Senate since a Filipino official indicated months ago that the ICC had an arrest warrant ready to go.
“I appeal to [Marcos Jr] not to send me to The Hague,” Rappler reported Dela Rosa as saying on Tuesday.
“We don’t know, one day, you might face the same hurdle, Mr President. You will know, you will feel what I feel right now.”
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Zach Hope is South-East Asia correspondent. He is a former reporter at the Brisbane Times.Connect via email.
