Profile Populist president known as the Punisher has lived a life of impunity

As Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte was notorious for his boasting. With cowboyish bravado, he bragged about a past of cruising around on his motorbike looking for suspected criminals to kill, or how at age 16 he stabbed someone to death.

- Kate Lamb

In 2016 he joked about missing out on the chance to rape an Australian missionary before she was murdered in jail in 1989.

Just months after he was elected president of the Philippines in 2016, he made a glowing and erroneous reference to the Holocaust as an aspirational analogy for his brutal "war on drugs".

"Hitler massacred three million Jews," he said, wrongly – the Nazis killed six million Jews. "Now, there are three million drug addicts. I'd be happy to slaughter them."

A populist who appears to relish hyperbole, denigrating women and attacking the press, Duterte, 79, was arrested yesterday for his alleged role in overseeing a bloody war on drugs that killed thousands of Filipinos and put on a flight headed to The Hague.

Duterte – a former prosecutor and longtime mayor of Davao, a city on the island of Mindanao – rose to the presidency in 2016 on blustering promises to eradicate drugs and crime, pledging a crackdown that would see 100,000 people killed and drug users' bodies fed to the fish in Manila Bay.