“What the president intended to say was you were ambushed and yet you are still alive. Let us be clear and categorical: the president did not order the ambush of General Loot,” Panelo told reporters.

Duterte exonerates fired prisons chief

During a speech in December 2018, Duterte had claimed that former interior secretary Mar Roxas was the one who ordered the hit on Loot – only for Panelo to dismiss his statement as a “joke” when it was reported.

Commenting on Duterte’s admission, Loot’s wife, Malou, said it would not become a big issue, and that they could not do anything about it as “the president is the president” and his spokesman would interpret it as a joke.

“Let us have peace. Let the president be because he would just say that he is just kidding anyway. Let us not make a big deal out of this because we are no match if we talk back to the president,” she told reporters in Cebu.

Despite the palace’s clarification, Malou said they would take the matter to court.

“We’re in the Philippines and we have democracy. We have a process so if there is a case, we will answer it with our lawyers,” she added.

Months after he assumed the presidency in 2016, Duterte also admitted he personally killed criminal suspects during his time as mayor of Davao.

The president is currently facing two complaints made to the International Criminal Court. The first was filed by a former policeman and confessed assassin who alleged that Duterte ordered the killings of criminals and opponents when he was Davao mayor, and the second was filed by the relatives of eight people killed in his war on drugs.

Will backlash force Duterte to retreat from South China Sea oil deal?

Duterte also on Tuesday renewed his offer of big bounties for hundreds of convicted murderers and rapists set free in a corrections bureau blunder, and said he would be happier if they were caught dead rather than alive.

The release under a good behaviour reward programme of more than 1,700 criminals guilty of dangerous offences has been a huge embarrassment for Duterte, who was elected almost entirely on promises to make the streets safer.

He said there was a “prize” of a million pesos (US$19,175) for each of the former felons still at large, after less than 700 of them heeded his call for their surrender.

“The 1 million prize is available to those who can capture them dead or alive. But maybe dead would be a better option. I will pay you smiling,” he told reporters late on Tuesday.

His latest remarks are likely to outrage opponents who accuse him of deliberately using rhetoric that incites vigilantism. His office rejects that and says his tough talk is endearing to millions of Filipinos.

The good conduct law was passed under Duterte’s predecessor to try to reduce the populations of some of the world’s most crowded jails.

More than 21,000 inmates were released, but justice ministry officials say more than 2,000 of them were sentenced for crimes, like rape, drugs, murder, bribery, plunder, kidnapping and arson, and therefore they were not eligible for release.

Rodrigo Duterte finally fires favourite official Nicanor Faeldon

Some 1,700 of them were freed by a corrections bureau run by Duterte’s appointees, two of them his staunch loyalists. The most recent, Nicanor Faeldon, was sacked this month after it emerged that nearly 900 serious offenders were freed on his watch. Faeldon denies wrongdoing.

Duterte defended the appointment on Tuesday of a new corrections bureau boss – a prison chief for whom prosecutors have sought homicide charges.

Gerald Bantag ran a jail in Manila’s Paranaque City, where in 2016, a grenade explosion killed 10 inmates, most of them drug offenders. A court has yet to take up the case.

Duterte said he believed Bantag was the right choice.

“I don’t think that he did it. If he did, then he might be convicted,” he said.

“But in the meantime, I like him because I heard he throws grenades,” he added, nonchalantly.