VIENTIANE: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has vowed to personally tear apart and eat Abu Sayyaf militants, in a bloodthirsty vow of revenge for deadly attacks.
"They will pay. When the time comes, I will eat you in front of people," Duterte told an audience of Filipinos late on Monday night while in Laos for a regional summit.
"If you make me mad, in all honesty, I will eat you alive, raw."
Duterte often hurls abusive insults at critics and is waging a brutal war on crime in which nearly 3,000 people have been killed since he took office on June 30.
His aides often urge reporters against taking Duterte´s comments literally, cautioning that the 71-year-old former lawyer speaks in a crude language of the people.
During the election campaign earlier this year Duterte attracted widespread criticism for saying he had wanted to rape a "beautiful" Australian missionary who had been sexually assaulted and murdered in a Philippine prison riot.
Duterte, 71, also claimed to keep two mistresses in cheap boarding houses who he took to short-stay hotels for sexual encounters.
Duterte on Monday offered a particularly vivid description of how he would like to eat Abu Sayyaf militants, who killed 15 soldiers last month and are accused of a bombing in his home city last week that claimed 14 lives.
"I will really carve your torso open. Give me vinegar and salt and I will eat you. I´m not kidding," Duterte said, according to an official video of his speech posted on Tuesday.
"These guys are beyond redemption."
The Abu Sayyaf are a small band of militants based on remote southern islands of the mainly Catholic Philippines and are listed by the United States as a terrorist organisation.
They are notorious for kidnapping foreigners to extract ransoms, and this year beheaded two Canadian hostages.
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