Philippine Senate security officers probed after May 13 gunfire during Dela Rosa standoff

Authorities in the Philippines are looking into Senate security staff who are said to have fired their weapons without being threatened, at a time when a senator subject to an International Criminal Court arrest warrant was sheltering inside the legislature and later got away.

Juanito Victor Remulla, secretary of the interior and local government, said on Tuesday that the shooting on 13 May was not an "attack on the Senate", and that nobody was in the area when the gun went off.

Remulla named Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Mao Aplasca as the officer who fired the first shot. National Police chief Jose Melencio Nartatez said investigators recovered 44 spent cartridges linked to four firearms. He said Aplasca had been asked to attend a police inquiry for gun testing but had not yet done so. Closed-circuit television footage subpoenaed from the Senate, investigators said, appeared to show him firing a rifle.

Remulla said the president has been told what investigators have found so far, but has not "given instructions yet". The file is being passed to the Department of Justice for further work.

Nartatez said dela Rosa left the legislative building and entered a car registered to his ally, Senator Robin Padilla, which then drove off to an unknown destination.

"All evidence points that there was no attack on the Senate," Remulla said, adding that government agents "never set foot" inside the Senate building.

The episode took place last week, when Senator Ronald Dela Rosa, a 64-year-old former police chief and a leading figure in ex-President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs, took refuge in the Senate on 11 May after the ICC confirmed it had unsealed his arrest warrant on suspicion of crimes against humanity. The chamber was shaken by the sound of many gunshots, and armed soldiers entered later that day in an effort to arrest him.

Dela Rosa was Duterte's top lieutenant and oversaw a hard crackdown on drug dealers in which thousands were shot dead in killings widely treated as extrajudicial. Duterte was arrested last year and is awaiting trial before the ICC in The Hague.