With ICC drug war probe request, wife seeks justice for husband killed in 2016

A wife is seeking justice for the death of her husband who was killed by four armed assailants inside their home in Payatas, Quezon City.

Interviewed on Maki Pulido's 24 Oras report, Lily (not her real name) vividly remembered how her husband was shot to death in December 2016, the first year of the Duterte administration's bloody anti-drug campaign.

Lily said she was cooking spaghetti for her kid's birthday when four unidentified civilians barged into their home aiming their guns at her husband.

While hugging their child, Lily's husband was begging on his knees, asking to be detained instead of being killed.

"My husband was begging, he said 'please don't kill me, please just detain me forever, but don't kill me," Lily said, in Filipino, while weeping.

The case of Lily's husband is just one of many drug war deaths that an International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor requested the international court  to look into.

In a statement, outgoing ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda asked the ICC to open a full probe into the drug war killings in the country. The tribunal has four months to decide on the prosecutor's request.

In her own probe,  Bensouda found reasonable basis to believe that the "crime against humanity of murder has been committed on the territory of the Philippines between 1 July 2016 and 16 March 2019."

Malacañang, however, insisted that the ICC probe is legally wrong because in 2019 the Philippines already exited the Rome Statute, which established the international court.

Bensouda said the ICC still has jurisdiction over the crimes committed in the country despite the withdrawal.

Meanwhile, five years after the incident, Lily is hoping that the probe could give justice to her husband's death.

"I do hope that we can get the justice that we deserve but if there will be no results in the investigation, we don't have a choice but to accept everything," she said, in Filipino.

Philippine government data showed security forces have killed 6,117 drug suspects in sting operations from July 2016 to April this year. -- Consuelo Marquez/BAP, GMA News