The man who helped put former president Rodrigo Duterte on a plane to The Hague is leaving the door open to doing it again — this time for a sitting senator.
MMDA General Manager Nicolas Torre III said Friday that the agency could join the search for Sen. Ronald “Bato” Dela Rosa, whether under a direct order from Malacañang or simply as part of a government-wide effort in areas under metropolitan jurisdiction.
“Part pa rin naman ako ng gobyerno e. Kaya in terms of manhunt, pwede naman kaming sumali. Binabantayan namin. Malay mo nagtago sa landfill, sa estero, sa kalsada, yan pwede kaming maasahan dyan,” Torre said at a media forum in Manila.
Asked whether he would act on a hypothetical directive from President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Torre was direct: “‘Pag Presidente nag-utos, automatic no choice diba? Mga otoridad mismo nagsasabi, legal ang warrant, pwedeng i-implement.”
He was careful, however, to define the limits of the MMDA’s role. Other agencies with primary responsibility over areas outside the MMDA’s mandate should take the lead, he said, framing the situation as a whole-of-government concern. “Pero sa ibang areas na may iba namang office of primary responsibility, e sila na magtrabaho kasi whole-of-government approach siya e,” Torre added.
Dela Rosa’s ICC arrest warrant, originally sealed on November 6, 2025, was formally unsealed by Pre-Trial Chamber I on May 11, 2026. He had gone into hiding after learning of the warrant and resurfaced at the Senate that same day to vote in the chamber’s leadership contest, only to evade NBI agents waiting to serve the warrant. He later escaped the Senate building in the early hours of May 14 and remained at large as of the latest reports.
Torre’s current position at the MMDA puts him at the center of a broader search effort. The agency confirmed it is prepared to share CCTV footage from areas near the Senate complex in Pasay City, following a request from the Department of Justice. “Whatever the investigating office needs, and whatever the other government agencies need, the MMDA is ready to offer it. We will give them all the information that is on our database,” Torre said.
The DOJ formally ordered the PNP and the National Bureau of Investigation to implement the arrest warrant after the Supreme Court denied Dela Rosa’s petition for a temporary restraining order.
Torre, who previously led both the arrest of Apollo Quiboloy and the implementation of the ICC warrant against Duterte as head of the PNP’s Criminal Investigation and Detection Group, distanced the current situation from any notion of personal vendetta or political score-settling. “Ang pagtingin ko dyan sa mga bagay na yan kasi institutional yan e. It’s not about a person. It’s not about me. It’s not about Senator Bato. This is about a process, a system, a law,” he said, adding: “We have to respect the process, let the systems work.”
The ICC found reasonable grounds to believe Dela Rosa bears criminal responsibility for the crime against humanity of murder through his involvement in a common plan to kill alleged criminals that ran from approximately November 2011 to March 2019, covering his time as Davao City police director and later as PNP chief.
