Men shot and left to bleed out on busy streets, mutilated corpses dumped in vacant lots. The bodies are piling up as Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war brings terror to Filipino slums.
Hundreds of people have died since Duterte won a landslide election in May, promising to rid society of drugs and crime in six months by killing tens of thousands of criminals.
Police figures showed this week that 402 drug suspects had been killed since Duterte was sworn in at the end of June. That figure does not include those slain by suspected vigilantes.
The country’s top broadcaster, ABS-CBN, reported that 603 people had been killed since Duterte’s May election, with 211 murdered by unidentified gunmen.
Anti-narcotics and human rights groups from different parts of the world, on Wednesday, appealed to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) to condemn Duterte’s war on drugs.