Elements of the 3rd Special Forces Battalion of the Philippine Army fired indiscriminately on 15 June at a group of six unarmed farmers heading towards the town center of Lianga, Surigao del Sur in southern Philippines, killing three, Willy Rodriguez, Lenie Rivas, and 12-year old girl Angel Rivas. The three others were able to flee the bloodbath.

Willy Rodriguez and Lenie Rivas were members of the Lumad indigenous organization MAPASU. Angel Rivas was a grade six student of the Tribal Filipino Program of Surigao del Sur (TRIFPSS).

Family members who identified the bodies of the victims said that their faces and limbs were mutilated. The genitalia of the females, Lenie and Angel, were also reportedly mutilated, leading to fears that the Philippine Army soldiers raped them before they were killed. President Rodrigo Duterte had earlier told his security forces to “shoot female rebels in the vagina.”

Human rights alliance Karapatan strongly condemned the killings. “This is a testimony of the Duterte regime’s hideous legacy of killings that count up to the last year of this regime,” Karapatan Secretary General Cristina Palabay said. “The perpetrators are mad killers... they look at the Lumad people like hunted prey, lying to their teeth and falsely tagging the victims as members of the New People’s Army.”

Gabriela women’s alliance demanded that the Armed Forces of the Philippines “be held to account for its countless crimes against the Filipino people, especially towards Lumad women, and the women of other indigenous peoples in the Philippines.”

The Philippine Army claimed that the three victims were members of the New People's Army. Coni Ledesma, Head of the NDFP Special Office for the Protection of Children refuted the claim, “The truth is, Rodriguez and Lenie Rivas were farmers, and 12-year old Angel was too young to be a member of the New People's Army... We reiterate the strict policy that no person under 18 years of age can become a member of the New People’s Army.”

Marco Valbuena, Chief Information Officer of the Communist Party of the Philippines, said on 25 June that at least seven civilians have been killed by Duterte’s security forces in just the past three weeks. These attacks, he said, “are being carried out systematically by the Philippine National Police and Armed Forces of the Philippines against civilians not taking part in armed hostilities, in violation of international laws governing armed conflicts.”

Valbuena said the attacks aim “to strike fear in the hearts of the people to silence and paralyze their resistance against the regime’s corruption, brutalities and betrayal of the nation’s sovereignty.”

Amid the killings, the AFP on 23 June announced that it had received PhP183 million ($3.8 million) worth of weapons and defense equipment from the US government. The Philippines has been the largest recipient of US military assistance in the Indo-Pacific region, according to the US Embassy in Manila.