News ‘They were shot in the head’: morgue gives up truth of Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war

[thegreenhand]

‘They were shot in the head’: morgue gives up truth of Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war​

Rebecca Ratcliffe
The Guardian
26 Feb 2023

Excerpts:

It was in an old university stockroom, with wooden tables salvaged from a junkyard, that Raquel Fortun began to investigate the merciless crackdown launched under the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte.

Fortun, one of only two forensic pathologists in the country, has now spent more than 18 months examining the exhumed remains of dozens of victims of the so-called “war on drugs”, revealing serious irregularities in how their postmortems were performed – including multiple death certificates that wrongly attributed fatalities to natural causes.

Most recently, her findings have raised questions about examinations carried out on the body of Kian delos Santos, a 17-year-old boy whose death at the height of the shootings provoked global outrage.

CCTV footage showed police dragging a male matching Delos Santos’s description towards the spot where he was killed. His is the only known case where police have been convicted of murder. Despite intense scrutiny at the time of his death, examinations by both the Philippine National Police and the Public Attorney’s Office failed to spot a bullet that was still lodged in his neck, according to Fortun’s findings. “It’s evidence that has been missed,” she says.

Such omissions are not uncommon; Fortun has found at least one bullet left in about 15 other victims’ remains. She also found that only superficial cuts had been made during autopsies on Delos Santos’s body, meaning no internal examination was carried out. This is despite a report, signed by a doctor, referencing Delos Santos’s stomach contents.