PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte said Monday Senator Leila de Lima should resign and hang herself for failing to be a woman of integrity.
“If I were De Lima, ladies and gentlemen, I will hang myself. The innermost of your core as a female being serialized everyday, you should resign,” Duterte said in Tacloban Monday.
“You must resign. What will you tell to all the women in this country? Follow me, you say? Is this is how to be woman of the world?” he asked.
In a separate speech in Catbalogan City, Duterte urged his nemesis De Lima to talk about her “immoral” ways.
“Explain? You explain first your behavior and your womanhood,” he said.
The President had earlier tagged De Lima, a former Justice secretary and her lover-driver, Ronnie Palisoc Dayan of having links to the illegal drug trade.
Duterte insinuated that her lover-driver, Dayan, was the key to unraveling extent of De Lima’s involvement.
“The driver is the one who is in the matrix, he holds all the secret—he has the connection inside.”
Reacting to the President’s new tirade, De Lima said she refused to resign because this would be a sign of weakness and guilt.
“I’m neither weak nor guilty!” she said.
De Lima said she had already considered resigning when the President started bombarding her with false accusations for doing her job when she was chairman of the Commission on Human Rights and secretary of Justice.
De Lima said she would no longer answer questions about Duterte’s drug matrix, which purportedly shoed her links to the so-called Muntinlupa Connection, which also involved former governor and now Pangasinan Rep. Amado Espino and drug lords detained at the New Bilibid Prison (NBP).
“I’m already tired of denying. That’s what I will do because that’s what I know is the truth. I have no involvement there. That’s the truth! I don’t want to speak about it anymore,” said De Lima.
Asked anew if she would attend the House inquiry on the proliferation of illegal drugs at the New Bilibid Prisons under her watch, De Lima replied: “Why should I?”
“I know nothing will come out of it. I was already judged guilty by the President. And do you think that House inquiry will be anything near fair to me? I’m already judged guilty! I’m finished in so far as President is concerned. That’s why he is asking me to resign. And then I will face them?” she said.
The feisty senator lamented that the President’s war against illegal drugs had became a “war against De Lima.”
“I told you, this was unimaginable, unprecedented, being done by no less than the President to a female official,” said De Lima.
She said those being perceived close were also being dragged into the drug controversy to create a whole web of operations while it was made to appear that she was a drug overlord.
While visiting PO1 Nestor Villanueva at St. Paul Hospital in Tacloban City, Duterte challenged De Lima to resign as a senator and hang herself.
Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez earlier slammed De Lima for describing the upcoming House hearings “a kangaroo court.”
“(Secretary de Lima) must remember that Congress, including the Senate, is not a court of law. We cannot act as if we are in [the] judiciary . . . We only conduct investigation in aid of legislation,” Alvarez told a radio interview.
Alvarez also questioned the intent of De Lima to conduct the Senate probe on the alleged cases of summary executions and extra-judicial killings linked to the drug war launched by the Duterte administration.
“The ongoing Senate investigation summary execution (was a futile exercise). If indeed they found out there is summary execution, so what?” Alvarez said.
“She will still refer the findings to the Department of Justice, which will conduct its own preliminary investigation, so, she just wasted time,” he added.
Alvarez earlier sponsored House Resolution 105 asking the appropriate committee in the House to conduct a “comprehensive investigation” into the “involvement and accountability of the authorities mandated to exercise control and supervision over the national penitentiary under the leadership of then Secretary of the Department of Justice Leila M. De Lima, and such other heads of law enforcement agencies tasked with implementing law enforcement policies, particularly those combating the use, proliferation and trade of illegal and prohibited drugs.”
Alvarez maintained all the reported proliferation of drug syndicates in the NBP happened during the time when de Lima was the DoJ secretary.