‘They were shot in the head’: morgue gives up truth of Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war

Crusading pathologist Raquel Fortun finds evidence of multiple murder at the direction of a madman' in the exhumed remains of young Filipinos

It was in an old university stockroom, with wooden tables salvaged from a junkyard, that Raquel Fortun began to investigate the merciless crackdown launched under the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte.

Fortun, one of only two forensic pathologists in the country, has now spent more than 18 months examining the exhumed remains of dozens of victims of the so-called war on drugs", revealing serious irregularities in how their postmortems were performed - including multiple death certificates that wrongly attributed fatalities to natural causes.