Former President Rodrigo Duterte will not attend the continuation of the investigation of the House quad committee on Thursday into his bloody drug war despite an earlier commitment that he will face the allegations leveled against him this month.

In a letter, Duterte’s legal counsel Martin Delgra III informed committee chairperson Representative Ace Barbers about his client’s absence, saying that “his presence is no longer necessary” considering that he already attended a Senate panel conducting a parallel investigation into the same subject matter.

Delgra added that the former President is already “doubtful” as to the committee’s “integrity, independence, and probity,” citing its ulterior motive to hold him criminally liable as made evident by the previous pronouncements of the panel’s co-chairs — Bienvenido Abante Jr. and Dan Fernandez.

“While my client’s attendance is supposedly for him to provide valuable insights and to shed light on issues under discussion particularly on extrajudicial killings (EJK), it is apparent that the inquiry is a mere political ploy aimed to indict him for crimes he did not commit,” the letter read.

To recall, Duterte attended a Senate investigation on 28 October into the alleged EJK committed during his notorious anti-drug campaign but skipped the same probe by the quad comm on 22 October, citing sickness. However, he assured the mega-panel that he would appear in the subsequent hearings in November onwards.

During the Senate’s inquiry, Duterte said that he takes “full, legal responsibility” for the massive killings of his brutal war on drugs and that police officers must be spared from liability.

The former President also explicitly said that he encouraged police to provoke drug suspects to fight back as a pretext to kill them.

In response to Duterte’s testimony, Abante and Fernandez implied that his alleged admission could lead to his very own prosecution for potentially violating Republic Act 9851, a law defining and penalizing crimes against humanity.

“If that is indeed their belief, then the proper course of action would be for them to file the proper criminal cases against my client before the Department of Justice and for the latter to resolve whether probable cause exists or not,” Delgra said.

He added that Duterte is also “gravely concerned” about how the quad comm “tried to persuade if not unduly pressure, resource persons to admit matters under oath they lack knowledge of or worst, unduly induce them to say something not true,” which he asserted constituted subornation of perjury.

Earlier, Police Colonel Hector Grijaldo accused Abante and Fernandez of pressuring him into corroborating the affidavit of retired police colonel Royina Garma about the supposed cash reward given by Duterte to police in exchange for killing drug suspects.

Garma, Duterte’s alleged trusted aide, claimed under oath that Duterte’s drug war involved incentives ranging from P20,000 to P1 million, depending on the prominence of the target.