The Senate committee on justice will end its inquiry into drug-related extrajudicial killings in the country. It was a move branded by some senators as "a travesty of the truth."
The decision to hold the final hearing next week came after a closed-door caucus of the committee chaired by Sen. Richard Gordon yesterday.
The hearing which lasted for 13 hours was marred by bickering among senators, highlighted by the walkout of Sen. Leila de Lima.
De Lima said yesterday that he colleagues are ganging up on her base on flimsy reasons just to stop the inquiry.
Among the issues that cropped up in previous hearings were De Lima and Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV allegedly using the hearings to destabilize the Duterte administration, and the lack of credibility of self-confessed hit man Edgar Matobato.
On Monday, Gordon and Sen. Panfilo Lacson confronted De Lima on her apparent concealment of a kidnapping case filed against Matobato by the family of Sali Makdum, whom the witness claimed was a terrorist that President Duterte had allegedly ordered to kill.
According to Gordon, Matobato will no longer be an issue because he's damaged goods. "There's no probative value (in his testimony) because he has totally destroyed his credibility," he said.
"The nature of our investigation is not adversarial. We are all here to find out what's the truth of the matter so that we can come out with proper legislation," he added.
Matobato had testified that Duterte had ordered the killing of over 1,000 suspected criminals and opponents from 1988 to 2013 when he was mayor of Davao City. He also claimed that he was a member of the Davao death squad that took orders from Duterte through his trusted police aide.
In previous hearings, Lacson and Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano pointed to several inconsistencies in Matobato's testimonies.
Source: Philippine Star
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