Manila:  According to court records obtained by AFP on Tuesday, a Philippine police officer was found guilty of murdering two teenagers during the drug war of the late president Rodrigo Duterte. This conviction marks a rare instance in which one of the enforcers of the crackdown was found guilty.

In the course of his six-year term, which ended in June 2022, Duterte explicitly instructed police to shoot drug suspects dead if their lives were in danger. Official statistics claim that more than 6,200 people lost their lives during the anti-drug campaign, but human rights organisations believe that the true number was likely much higher.

For killing a suspect during the crackdown, only three police officers had previously been found guilty; this prompted the International Criminal Court to launch an investigation (ICC).

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Reynaldo De Guzman, 14, and Carl Arnaiz, 19, were killed by Jefrey Perez on March 1 in Manila, according to a copy of the judgement released by the public prosecutor's office.

On the same day, Perez was given a minimum prison term of 20 years.
He was already incarcerated for a significant amount of time after being convicted in November of torturing the two teenagers by a different court.
Police officer Ricky Arquilita, his co-defendant, passed away during the initial trial. Both disputed the accusations.

On August 17, 2017, De Guzman and Arnaiz were last spotted together.
One of the teenagers, Arnaiz, was shot by the police after he was seen exiting a parked police car while handcuffed and shouting, "I will surrender," according to a witness at the trial.

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Weeks later, De Guzman's body was discovered in the area north of Manila. It was stabbed numerous times. Duterte's successor, President Ferdinand Marcos, vowed to continue the drug war while emphasising prevention and rehabilitation.

However, rights organisations assert that while he was in office, the murders persisted. Because its pre-trial chamber was "not satisfied that the Philippines is undertaking relevant investigations that would warrant a deferral of the court's investigations," the ICC announced in January that it would resume its investigation into the drug war.

Carlos Conde, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that while he appreciated the Philippine court's decision, the conviction's rarity demonstrated how "broken" the justice system was. Out of thousands of similar cases, this is only the second drug war murder conviction, according to Conde. "This is... evidence that the ICC must intervene,"

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Three police officers were found guilty in 2018 of killing Kian delos Santos, a student, at the age of 17 in a Manila alley. He was a drug courier, according to police, who fired at them while trying to escape arrest. CCTV footage, however, captured two officers dragging the unarmed boy just before he was fatally shot.