I’ll kill you, president tells ‘drug lord’

MANILA, Saturday

President Rodrigo Duterte met with a businessman he accused of being one of the Philippines’ top drug traffickers and threatened to have him killed.

In the bizarre meeting that evoked scenes from a gangster film, the hardline anti-crime president warned Peter Lim to steer clear of narcotics.

“I will execute you.... I will finish you off,” President Duterte said during the tense meeting with the wealthy businessman.

A video of the sit down was posted on a government YouTube channel on Saturday with a caption identifying Lim as “one of the top drug lords in the triad involved in illegal drug operations in the country”.

But the businessman denied that he was the alleged Chinese-Filipino drug dealer Peter Lim, singled out by the president in an address on national television on July 7.

Peter Lim is a fairly common name in the Philippines, where a sizeable part of the population claims ethnic Chinese descent.

The Peter Lim that Duterte met with said since the address — in which the president said “the moment he steps out of the plane, he will die” — he has feared for his life.

“My family is really in a deep problem now in Cebu. We are getting all the threats,” Lim said, referring to the central city where he runs a string of businesses.

But Duterte shot back: “I will not say I am sorry because the reason you are here is that you are a suspected drug lord.”

Duterte built a fearsome anti-crime reputation as long-time mayor of the southern city of Davao, where he would read out the names of drug suspects on his local radio programme and the shamed personalities would later turn up dead on city streets.

He won the May election by landslide, largely on a pledge to kill tens of thousands of drug suspects and other criminals.

The Philippines has a high crime rate, blamed mainly on a large population, illiteracy and poverty. The country also suffers a drug problem.

Since coming to power, Duterte has publicly shamed police top brass, politicians and private personalities whom he linked to narcotics, and a nationwide crackdown has seen nearly 400 drug suspects shot dead by police officers or suspected anti-crime vigilantes.

Local and international human rights groups and opposition politicians have raised an outcry over the deadly anti-drugs campaign, but the government has insisted that the dead suspects fought police officers and that the vigilante killings were being investigated.

During his meeting with Duterte, which took place at a drug enforcement agency office in the southern city of Davao, Lim denied any involvement in illegal drugs, but admitted that he was investigated in 1997 for alleged links to narcotics.