Philippine President Marcos says he will fight the Vice President’s plan to have him killed

MANILA, Philippines (AP) – Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. described Monday one public threat of the vice president having him killed by an assassin as a criminal plot and vowing to fight it, in a looming showdown between the country’s two top leaders.

Vice President Sara Duterte said in an online news conference on Saturday that she has contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the speaker of the House of Representatives if she herself is killed, in a threat she warned was not a joke.

The national police and military immediately beefed up the president’s security, and the Justice Department said it would summon the vice president for an investigation. The National Security Council said it considered the threat a national security concern.

The vice president, a lawyer, later tried to walk back her remarks, saying it was not an actual threat but an expression of concern for her own safety over an unspecified threat.

“Why should I kill him, if not to get revenge from the grave? There is no reason for me to kill him. What is the benefit to me?” Duterte told reporters.

“The criminal plot should not be allowed to pass,” Marcos said in a televised statement without mentioning Duterte by name. “I will fight it.”

“As a democratic country, we have to uphold the rule of law,” Marcos said.

Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice presidential candidate in the May 2022 election, and both won landslide victories on a campaign call for national unity. In the Philippines, the two posts are elected separately.

However, the two leaders and their camps soon had a bitter quarrel over important differences, including in theirs approaches to China’s aggressive territorial claims in the disputed South China Sea. Duterte resigned from the Marcos cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency agency.

On Monday, Justice Secretary Jesse Andres said in a press conference that Duterte would be subpoenaed to face an investigation.

Andres called the vice president “the self-confessed mastermind” of a “premeditated plan to assassinate the president.” All government resources and law enforcement agencies will be mobilized to identify the alleged assassin and determine criminal responsibility, he said.

“We have to maintain order in a civilized society by upholding the rule of law and we will apply the full force and power of the law to this,” Andres said.

Under Philippine law, such public remarks may constitute a crime of threatening to cause harm to a person or his family, punishable by imprisonment and a fine.

The Philippine Constitution states that if a President dies, sustains a permanent disability, is removed from office, or resigns, the Vice President takes over and serves for the remainder of the term.

Duterte said she was ready to face investigators or an impeachment complaint in Congress, but added that she would also demand answers to her allegations against Marcos and his allies.

“I will not allow what they did to me to pass either,” she told reporters.

The vice president is the daughter of Marcos’ predecessor, Rodrigo Dutertewhose police-enforced anti-narcotics crackdown, when he was the city’s mayor and later president, left thousands of mostly petty drug suspects dead in killings that the International Criminal Court has investigated as a possible crime against humanity.

Like his equally outspoken father, the vice president became a vocal critic of Marcos, his wife Liza Araneta-Marcos and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, the president’s cousin, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and political persecution by the Duterte family and its supporters.

Last month, the vice president told reporters that her relationship with Marcos had “gone so toxic” that she envisioned “cutting off his head.

Romualdez told the House of Representatives that the vice president was trying to divert attention from her alleged misuse of public funds, which Congress is investigating. Several lawmakers reaffirmed their confidence in the House speech and condemned Duterte’s remarks.

Her latest tirade was sparked by the decision by members of the House of Representatives allied with Romualdez and Marcos to detain Duterte’s chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who was accused of obstructing a congressional investigation into possible abuse of Duterte’s budget as vice president and education secretary. Lopez has been detained in a hospital after being traumatized by a plan by lawmakers to temporarily detain her in jail.

In a pre-dawn online news conference on Saturday, an angry Duterte accused Marcos of incompetence as president and of being a liar, along with his wife and the speaker of the House, in expletive-filled remarks.

As concerns about her safety were raised, Duterte, 46, suggested there was an unspecified plan to kill her. “Don’t worry about my safety because I have spoken to someone. I said ‘if I am killed, you kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke,'” the vice president said without elaborating and using the initials, which many use to refer to the president.

“I have given my order: ‘If I die, don’t stop until you kill them.’ And he said, ‘yes,'” the vice president said.