Filipino cops accused of using ‘wheel of torture’
Print Edition
Philippine police officers have played a “wheel of torture” game to have fun and punish criminal suspects during interrogations, including bouts of punching named after boxing star Manny Pacquiao, according to human rights officials and activists.
Under the game, detainees — mostly suspected drug traffickers — were punched if the “torture wheel” stopped at “20 seconds Manny Pacman,” Pacquiao’s nickname, or hung upside down if it stopped at a punishment called “30-second bat,” Amnesty International said yesterday. The London-based rights group called the practice despicable.
A picture of the multi-colored wheel provided by the Commission on Human Rights showed several other tortures, including “3 minutes zombies” and “30-second duck walk/ferris wheel” but it was not immediately clear how those punishments were carried out.
“It’s horrible,” commission Chairwoman Loretta Ann Rosales said. “They do it for fun, it’s like a game for entertainment. We’re trying to correct this mindset based on a human rights approach to policing but obviously it may take a lot of time.”
Allegations of torture have particular resonance in the Philippines, which emerged from a brutal era of dictatorship nearly three decades ago. Thousands of victims during dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s rule won a class action suit against his estate for torture and other rights violations in 1992 in Hawaii. An army-backed “people power” revolt ousted Marcos in 1986.
President Benigno Aquino III has pledged to prosecute violators of human rights. But rights groups say violations have continued with impunity.
The violations allegedly took place at a police intelligence office in Binan town in Laguna province south of Manila which has not been accredited as a detention center and was holding crime suspects illegally, Rosales said.
She said her commission investigated after receiving a tip early this month on alleged abuses of more than 40 detainees. The maltreatment allegedly occurred last year and this month.
Rosales said she has urged top police officials to pursue criminal complaints against about 10 officers who were implicated in the abuses.
National police spokesman Senior Superintendent Reuben Theodore Sindac said several officers have been taken into custody and an investigation is under way.
“For police officers to use torture ‘for fun’ is despicable,” Amnesty International’s Hazel Galang-Folli said in a statement. “These are abhorrent acts. Suspending officers is not enough. Errant police personnel and their commanding officers should be held accountable in a court of law.”
The group urged Aquino’s administration “to act immediately to put an end to routine torture.”
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