Inter­pol asked for help, and we obliged – Marcos

MANILA, Philippines — The Inter­na­tional Crim­inal Police Organ­iz­a­tion asked for help, and the Phil­ip­pines honored its com­mit­ments to the Inter­pol.

This was how Pres­id­ent Mar­cos explained his gov­ern­ment’s action on the arrest war­rant issued by the Inter­na­tional Crim­inal Court (ICC) for his pre­de­cessor Rodrigo Duterte.

“The arrest that we did today was in com­pli­ance with our com­mit­ment with Inter­pol. It just so happened that it came from the ICC, but it was not because it came from the ICC,” Mar­cos said.

Minutes after the jet tak­ing Duterte to The Hague took off at 11:03 p.m., Mar­cos explained his gov­ern­ment’s action.

He said the arrest war­rant, made pub­lic last night by Malacañang, was valid, and denied that the arrest was related to polit­ics or the pres­id­en­tial elec­tion in 2028.

Address­ing sup­port­ers of Duterte, he said, “The gov­ern­ment is just doing its job.”

Mar­cos stressed that the coun­try has needed Inter­pol help in numer­ous cases involving Filipino fugit­ives, among them dis­missed Bam­ban mayor Alice Guo and expelled Negros Ori­ental con­gress­man Arnolfo Teves.

The pres­id­ent said he received a phys­ical copy of the arrest war­rant at around 3 a.m. yes­ter­day. “I looked at it, we went back and forth.

I said, OK, we put all our plans into place, let’s pro­ceed with what we dis­cussed,” he said.

He stressed that the ICC star­ted the probe in 2017, when he was still a civil­ian.

“This is the evol­u­tion of this case and this is where we ended up,” he said.