MANILA – Prosecutors presented evidence before the Senate impeachment court on Monday showing that investigators reviewed Vice President Sara Duterte’s earlier public statements to establish the context of her alleged threats against President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. and other top officials.

Testifying before the impeachment court, lawyer Jeremy Lotoc, former chief of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Cybercrime Division, said the inquiry extended beyond Duterte’s widely reported Nov. 23, 2024 online press conference and included previous public remarks.

According to Lotoc, investigators conducting an open-source inquiry found an Oct. 18, 2024 press conference that was streamed on the official Facebook page of the Office of the Vice President.

“Gusto kong tanggalin iyong ulo niya (I want to remove his head),” Lotoc quoted Duterte as saying in the earlier recording.

He also cited Duterte’s statement, “I imagine myself cutting his head,” which he said referred to Marcos.

Lotoc told the court that investigators examined the earlier video as part of their assessment of Duterte’s intent, motive and capability in connection with her Nov. 23 remarks.

During that Nov. 23 press conference, Duterte said she had instructed a person to kill Marcos, First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos and then-House Speaker Martin Romualdez if she herself were killed.

Lotoc said the NBI Cybercrime Division launched its investigation on Nov. 23 upon the instruction of then-NBI director Jaime Santiago.

He outlined the four stages of the investigation: identification and preservation of digital evidence, collection and hashing, analysis and attribution, and legal evaluation and case filing.

Lotoc also testified that the Nov. 23 press conference was livestreamed on the Facebook page of former presidential spokesperson Harry Roque.

As part of the digital forensic process, investigators generated a hash value for the video, which Lotoc described as its digital “fingerprint” or “DNA,” to verify that the evidence had not been altered.

Now serving as NBI regional director for the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, Lotoc was presented by the House prosecution to explain the methods used by investigators in examining the context of Duterte’s statements and tracing the digital evidence.