Philippine ex-President Duterte faces criminal complaint over 'kill senators' comment at rally

MANILA, Philippines — Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is facing a criminal complaint Monday over comments he made during a campaign rally when he said 15 senators should be killed in a bombing to allow more vacant seats for his own party's candidates to fill.

The alleged illegal utterances and inciting to sedition were contained in a complaint filed by police Maj. Gen. Nicolas Torre III to the Department of Justice. They are the latest legal trouble to face the former president and his family under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Campaigning is underway for half of the 24 Senate seats for the May 12 mid-term elections in the Philippines. The former president's camp said his remarks were just a joke uttered to liven up a political rally on Thursday for the nine senatorial candidates of his PDP-Laban party.

''Let's kill senators now so there will be vacancies,'' Duterte said at the proclamation rally of his party's senatorial candidates. ''If we can kill about 15 senators, we're in...the only way to do it is, let's just stage an explosion.''

Torre said the tumultuous era during Duterte's six-year presidency, when he could just publicly threaten to kill anybody, was over.

''Our country went through a lot of troubles in those past six years,'' Torre told reporters. ''Do we want those troubles to continue, the constant threats of killings that they will dismiss later by just saying that these were just a joke?''

The danger with such remarks, Torre added, was that followers may take Duterte's remarks seriously and carry them out.

Duterte's daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, is facing an impeachment trial partly for publicly threatening to have Marcos, his wife and House Speaker Martin Romualdez assassinated if she herself were fatally attacked amid an escalating political rivalry between the two highest leaders of one of Asia's most unwieldy democracies.

The vice president has denied that her remarks in an online news conference in November amounted to a threat to kill Marcos although that was what she literally said.

The International Criminal Court has been investigating the large number of killings that happened under the former president's crackdowns against illegal drugs, which left thousands of mostly poor suspect dead, as a possible crime against humanity.

Duterte has denied he authorized extrajudicial killings under his anti-drugs crackdowns while he was in office, but he has openly and repeatedly threatened to kill suspected drug dealers while in power.