MANILA, Philippines, Nov 23, (AP): Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte said Saturday she has contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the House of Representatives speaker if she herself is killed, in a brazen public threat that she warned was not a joke. Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin referred the "active threat” against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr to an elite presidential guards force "for immediate proper action.”

It was not immediately clear what actions would be taken against the vice president. "Acting on the vice president’s clear and unequivocal statement that she had contracted an assassin to kill the president if an alleged plot against her succeeds, the Executive Secretary has referred this active threat to the Presidential Security Command for immediate proper action,” a government statement said. "Any threat to the life of the president must always be taken seriously, more so that this threat has been publicly revealed in clear and certain terms,” it said.

Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice-presidential running mate in the May 2022 elections and both won with landslide victories on a campaign call of national unity. The two leaders and their camps, however, rapidly had a bitter falling-out over key differences, including in their approaches to China’s aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea.

Duterte resigned from the Marcos Cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body. Like her equally outspoken father, former president Rodrigo Duterte, the vice president became a vocal critic of Marcos, his wife Liza Araneta-Marcos and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, the president’s ally and second cousin, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and politically persecuting the Duterte family and its close supporters. Her latest tirade was set off by the decision by House members allied with Romualdez and Marcos to detain her chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who was accused of hampering a congressional inquiry into the possible misuse of her budget as vice president and education secretary.

Lopez was later transferred to a hospital after falling ill and wept when she heard of a plan to temporarily lock her up in a women’s prison. In a pre-dawn online news conference, an angry Sara Duterte accused Marcos of incompetence as a president and of being a liar, along with his wife and the House speaker in expletives-laden remarks. When asked about concerns over her security, the 46-year-old lawyer suggested there was an unspecified plot to kill her. "Don’t worry about my security because I’ve talked with somebody. I said 'if I’m killed, you’ll kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke,’” the vice president said without elaborating and using the initials that many use to call the president.