Philippine VP, claiming threat on her life, says she’ll have the president assassinated if she’s killed

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. 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. Like her equally outspoken father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, the vice president became a vocal critic of Marcos, his wife, Liza Araneta-Marcos, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, the president’s ally and cousin, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and politically persecuting the Duterte family and its close supporters. “I’ve given my order, ‘If I die, don’t stop until you’ve killed them.’ And he said, ‘Yes,’” the vice president said. “We reiterate our need to stand together against those who will try to break our bonds as Filipinos.” Rodrigo Duterte, Marcos’ predecessor, embarked on a police-enforced anti-drug crackdown when he was a city mayor, and later as president left thousands of mostly petty drug suspects dead in killings that the International Criminal Court has been investigating as a possible crime against humanity.