Philippines authorities handed a subpoena to Vice President Sara Duterte’s office on Tuesday, inviting her to answer investigators’ questions after she publicly threatened to have the president, his wife and the House of Representatives Speaker assassinated if she were killed in an unspecified plot herself.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr on Monday described her threat as a criminal plot and vowed to fight it and uphold the rule of law in the country in a looming showdown between the country’s two top leaders.
The national police and the military expressed alarm and immediately boosted Mr Marcos’s security. National security adviser Eduardo Ano said the threats were a national security concern.
Ms Duterte, a 46-year-old lawyer, said her remarks were not an actual threat but an expression of concern over her own safety due to unspecified danger to her life.
The Marcos administration’s statements against her were “a farce” and part of efforts to persecute critics like her, she said.
The subpoena ordered Ms Duterte to appear before the National Bureau of Investigation on Friday to “shed light on the investigation for alleged grave threats”.
Ms Duterte said on Monday she was willing to face an investigation but demanded the Marcos administration also respond to her questions, including alleged irregularities in government.
Under Philippines law, such public remarks may constitute a crime of threatening to inflict a wrong on a person or their family and are punishable by a prison term and fine.
Mr Marcos had Ms Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in 2022 elections and both won landslide victories on a campaign call of national unity. In the Philippines, the two positions are elected separately.
The two leaders and their camps, however, soon had a bitter falling out over key differences, including in their approaches to China’s aggressive territorial claims in the disputed South China Sea.
Ms Duterte resigned from the Marcos Cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body and became one of the most vocal critics of the president, his wife and his cousin, Martin Romualdez, who heads the House of Representatives.
The House has been investigating alleged misuse of confidential government funds by Ms Duterte as vice president and when she headed the Department of Education.
