Manila (AFP) - A plane carrying former Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte left Manila bound for The Hague on Tuesday night following his arrest on an International Criminal Court warrant tied to his deadly war on drugs, President Ferdinand Marcos said.

The 79-year-old faces a charge of “the crime against humanity of murder”, according to the ICC, for a crackdown that rights groups estimate killed tens of thousands of mostly poor men, often without proof they were linked to drugs.

“Former president Rodrigo Roa Duterte took off at 11:03 pm this evening and exited Philippine airspace,” Marcos told a press briefing shortly after takeoff.

“The plane is en route to The Hague in the Netherlands allowing the former president to face charges of crimes against humanity in relation to his bloody war on drugs.”

Duterte was arrested at Manila’s international airport Tuesday after “Interpol Manila received the official copy of the warrant of the arrest from the ICC”, the presidential palace said in a morning statement.

Before his evening departure, Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte said her father was being “forcibly taken to The Hague”.

“This is not justice – this is oppression and persecution,” she said in a statement.

Duterte had earlier taken to social media to say he believed the Philippine Supreme Court would step in and prevent his transfer.

“The Supreme Court will not agree to that. We do not have an extradition treaty,” he said on Instagram live after his lawyers filed a petition with the court.

“What is the crime that I committed? Show to me now the legal basis of my being here,” he said in a separate video on the same platform.

Flight tracking data from FlightRadar.com showed that the plane carrying the former president – tail number RP-C5219 – was scheduled to leave Dubai for Rotterdam at 2130 GMT Tuesday.

While supporters dubbed his arrest “unlawful”, reactions from those who opposed Duterte’s drug war were jubilant.

One group working to support mothers of those killed in the crackdown called the arrest a “very welcome development”.

“The mothers whose husbands and children were killed because of the drug war are very happy because they have been waiting for this for a very long time,” Rubilyn Litao, coordinator for Rise Up for Life and for Rights, told AFP, while Philippine rights alliance Karapatan said his arrest was “long overdue”.

Human Rights Watch also said the arrest was a “critical step for accountability in the Philippines”.

China, however, warned the ICC against “politicisation” and “double standards” in the Duterte case, saying it was “closely monitoring the development of the situation”.

Neither the ICC nor the prosecutor’s office were able to offer immediate comment.

- A winding path -

Duterte’s morning arrest at Manila’s international airport followed a brief trip to Hong Kong.

Speaking to thousands of overseas Filipino workers there Sunday, the former president decried the investigation, labelling ICC investigators “sons of whores” while saying he would “accept it” if an arrest were to be his fate.

The Philippines quit the ICC in 2019 on Duterte’s instructions, but the tribunal maintained it had jurisdiction over killings before the pullout, as well as killings in the southern city of Davao when Duterte was mayor, years before he became president.

It launched a formal inquiry in September 2021, only to suspend it two months later after Manila said it was re-examining several hundred cases of drug operations that led to deaths at the hands of police, hitmen and vigilantes.

The case resumed in July 2023 after a five-judge panel rejected the Philippines’ objection that the court lacked jurisdiction.

Since then, the Marcos government has on numerous instances said it would not cooperate with the investigation.

But Undersecretary of the Presidential Communications Office Claire Castro on Sunday said that if Interpol would “ask the necessary assistance from the government, it is obliged to follow”.

Duterte is still hugely popular among many in the Philippines who supported his quick-fix solutions to crime, and he remains a potent political force.

He is running to reclaim his job as mayor of his stronghold Davao in May’s mid-term election.

A self-professed killer, Duterte while president instructed police to fatally shoot narcotics suspects if their lives were at risk and insisted the crackdown saved families and prevented the Philippines from turning into a “narco-politics state”.

At the opening of a Philippine Senate probe into the drug war in October, Duterte said he offered “no apologies, no excuses” for his actions.

“Whether or not you believe it or not, I did it for my country,” he said.