FORMER Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte told a senate hearing today that he had maintained a death squad of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of the southern Philippine city of Davao.

Mr Duterte, however, denied authorising police to gun down thousands of “suspects” in a bloody crackdown on illegal drugs he had ordered as president and which is the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court as a possible crime against humanity.

The former president attended the televised inquiry in his first public appearance since his term ended in 2022. The senate is looking into the drug killings under Mr Duterte, which were unprecedented in their scale in recent Philippine history.