President Rodrigo Duterte revealed that the lady he saved from a kidnapping in 1998 where he killed three of the kidnappers was now a doctor.
“She’s still alive. She is now a doctor, the woman,” said Duterte.
In a press conference in Davao City early Saturday morning, Duterte said the lady and her boyfriend were snatched while going into a betamax video rental store in the middle of downtown in his first few months in office as mayor of Davao City when it was still a “wild,wild west.”
Duterte said the lady was brought to Cotabato and kept for two months before her kidnappers sent feelers to her family demanding for a P2 million ransom. (He did not say what happened to the boyfriend).
The family was told not to report the kidnapping to the police but they reported the crime to Duterte who immediately planned a rescue mission with his police friends.
This is how Duterte described how the lady was saved and how he participated in the shootout which killed her abductors.
“So, on that fateful night, they were travelling. I was there with retired police Elson Estares and two others because they never expected that they would pass this way but they would return. It is not done. Usually if you pass in this area, you pass only once. You do not go back and…but the troops were there surrounding the house. So when we heard somebody inside, he’s a brave guy, Lima, he was the one I told. You go there because he was a shooter. I said could you take out three persons at one time, he said yes.”
“Okay you will be that inside the bedroom. And when she said the birdie, ‘birdie’ is safe. So they went down and it was covered by the televisions. The networks were just at the background. So, when they refused to stop, we saw a carbine pointed at us. We were parked nearby. So, the shooting started and I was one holding a…I was holding a .45 but you know, when I saw them coming back to our direction, I grabbed my M16, American-made, mind you…to kill criminals. Not extrajudicial, there was a firefight. And I said there were about only three of us there. So, I might have hit them all or none at all. But the fact is I was there and I fired at them. It was a pure case of kidnapping.”
“When I tell you now that I killed, do not term them as suspects because all of them died while they were fighting government people. What I said, what I related to you was this: they tried to escape with the money and we stopped them and we saw carbine, when the windows were open, carbine was pointed at us. That was not there, they were not suspects, I suppose. But by any amount of stretching the imagination, those are people who dared to fight the law. And because I had an M16, I carried one because Davao was then a wild country, I had to restore order and I took the bull by the horns.”
No comments:
Post a Comment