Palace: VP's 'kill' remark is active threat

Security detail for President Marcos has been put on alert over an active threat” against his life by Vice President Sara Duterte, Malacanang said yesterday.

- By NEIL JAYSON SERVALLOS

“Any threat to the life of the President must always be taken seriously, more so that this threat has been publicly revealed in clear and certain terms,” Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin said in a statement relayed through the Presidential Communications Office (PCO).

The statement followed an expletive-laced press conference in which Duterte alleged she was the subject of an assassination plot and that she ordered a member of her security team to kill the President should it succeed.

The Duterte and Marcos families have seen their alliance unravel in spectacular fashion in recent months, trading accusations of drug addiction and increasingly extreme rhetoric ahead of next year’s midterm elections and presidential polls in 2028.

The two families are at odds over foreign policy and former president Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs, among others.

“I already talked to a person in my security. I told him if I get killed, kill BBM (Ferdinand Marcos), (first lady) Liza Araneta and (the President’s cousin and Speaker) Martin Romualdez. No joke,” Duterte said at a press conference that began after midnight. “I said, if I die, don’t stop until you have killed them.”

She was responding to an online commenter urging her to stay safe, saying she was in enemy territory as she was at the premises of the House of Representatives with her detained chief of staff Zuleika Lopez.

Lopez was having her own virtual briefing when Duterte took over. “This country is going to hell because we are led by a person who doesn’t know how to be a president and who is a liar,” Duterte said at her briefing.