The Philippine vice president publicly threatens to have president assassinated

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte said Saturday she has contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the House of Representatives speaker if she herself is killed, in a brazen public threat that she warned was not a joke.

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin referred the “active threat” against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to an elite presidential guards force “for immediate proper action.” It was not immediately clear what actions would be taken against the vice president.

The Presidential Security Command boosted Marcos' security and said it considered the vice president's threat, which was “made so brazenly in public,” a national security issue.

The presidential security force said it was “coordinating with law enforcement agencies to detect, deter, and defend against any and all threats to the president and the first family.”

Duterte, a lawyer, later tried to walk back her remarks and said they were not an actual threat but only an expression of concern over an unspecified threat to her own life.

“If I expressed the concern, they will say that's a threat to the life of the president?” she said.

“Why would I kill him if not for revenge from the grave? There is no reason for me to kill him. What's the benefit for me?” Duterte told journalists.

Under the Philippine penal code, such public remarks may constitute a crime of threatening to inflict a wrong on a person or his family and is punishable by a jail term and fine.

The Philippine Constitution says that if a president dies, sustains a permanent disability, is removed from office or resigns, the vice president takes over and serves the rest of the term.

Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in the May 2022 elections and both won with landslide victories on a campaign call of national unity.

The two leaders and their camps, however, rapidly had a bitter falling-out over key differences, including in their approaches to China's aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea. Duterte resigned from the Marcos Cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body.

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