At least fifteen shots rang out inside the Philippine Senate on Wednesday as law enforcement agents and marines moved to arrest Senator Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa on an International Criminal Court warrant charging him with crimes against humanity. Dela Rosa escaped the building amid the chaos, and by Thursday the National Bureau of Investigation had declared a nationwide manhunt for the 64-year-old former national police chief.
No one was reported injured by the gunfire. But the scene, armed troops in body armor carrying long guns converging on a legislative chamber while a sitting senator broadcast pleas for help on Facebook, marks a new and dangerous chapter in the Philippines' reckoning with its bloody anti-drug campaign of the mid-2010s.
The ICC issued a sealed arrest warrant for Dela Rosa in November 2025, charging him in connection with at least 32 killings tied to the drug war he helped launch. That warrant was unsealed in May 2026, while Dela Rosa was serving his second term in the Senate. His former boss, ex-President Rodrigo Duterte, had already been arrested on the same charges in March 2025 and remains detained at the ICC facility in the Netherlands.
A week of escalation
The confrontation did not materialize overnight. When Dela Rosa returned to the Senate on Monday, NBI agents, the bureau that handles high-profile and political crimes in the Philippines, were already waiting to take him into custody. Instead of submitting, Dela Rosa camped out in his Senate office, prowling the Senate halls in shorts and slippers while his legal team fought the warrant in court.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Philippine Supreme Court dealt Dela Rosa a blow: it declined to issue a temporary restraining order blocking his arrest and gave President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. just 72 hours to respond to Dela Rosa's petition to quash the ICC warrant entirely.
With the legal shield gone, Dela Rosa used a break in Senate proceedings to go on Facebook. His message was direct and emotional.
"I am here calling for your help: let us not have another Filipino brought to The Hague like President Duterte."
That evening, police reportedly decided to force their way into the chambers. Philippine Marine Corps troops wearing body armor and carrying long guns supported the effort. What followed was a brawl, and someone fired at least fifteen rounds inside the Senate building.
Competing accounts of who pulled the trigger
The question of who fired the shots became its own political fight within hours. Senate Secretary Mark Llandro Mendoza claimed the shots came from NBI agents who attempted to force their way into the Senate and discharged firearms after being pushed back. The NBI flatly denied any of its agents were even in the building when the shots were fired.
A spokesperson for President Marcos offered a third account: the gunfire came from Mao Aplasca, identified as the sergeant-at-arms, who fired warning shots after spotting what he believed to be an NBI agent. Aplasca's exact role added further confusion, he was described at various points as both the Senate sergeant-at-arms and the acting sergeant-at-arms for the Philippine National Police.
By Thursday, police spokesman Randulf Tuano told a radio interviewer that one individual had been arrested in connection with the shooting. Tuano added that "the person has provided names, but these still need confirmation." He did not identify the suspect or elaborate on who else might be implicated.
The episode carries unsettling echoes of the broader confrontation between lawmakers and security forces that has defined the crisis.
Marcos distances himself
President Marcos moved quickly to deny any involvement. In a statement Wednesday night, he said he had not ordered Dela Rosa's arrest and insisted the armed police and troops at the Senate were there only for protection.
"The government did not do this. No soldier, military, or NBI agent entered the Senate. We do not know who tried to enter."
He went further, raising the possibility that the incident was something more than a botched arrest.
"We will find out who caused this chaos. Was this really just an encounter? Is this part of attempts to destabilize the government or trigger chaos? We need to know the truth."
Marcos has reason to be wary. The political landscape around him has grown increasingly volatile. Vice President Sara Duterte, the former president's daughter, publicly accused Marcos of plotting to assassinate her in November 2024. She went further, saying she had made arrangements for the murder of Marcos, First Lady Liza Araneta, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez in the event of her own death. She has also been accused of misusing public funds.
The Marcos-Duterte alliance, which carried the 2022 presidential ticket, has fractured in spectacular fashion. The ICC warrants have only deepened the divide.
The drug war's long shadow
Dela Rosa's legal peril traces directly to the anti-drug campaign he helped build. When Duterte won the presidency in 2016, he tapped Dela Rosa, who had served as his police chief in Davao City during the 1990s, to lead the Philippine National Police. One of Dela Rosa's first acts as PNP chief was issuing the directive that formally launched Project Double Barrel, the operational framework for the drug war.
Human rights groups have accused Duterte's government of killing over 12,000 people during the campaign. More than 2,500 of those deaths were directly attributed to the PNP. The ICC warrant against Dela Rosa specifically cites at least 32 killings.
Dela Rosa held the PNP chief post until 2018, then won a Senate seat in 2019. He had been into his second Senate term when the warrant was unsealed.
Duterte himself, arrested in March 2025, offered a resigned reflection on his fate. When international law enforcement operations target high-ranking officials abroad, the proceedings often raise questions about sovereignty and institutional accountability that echo well beyond any single country's borders.
"What was my sin? I did everything in my time so Filipinos can have a little peace and tranquility. If this is my fate in life, it's OK, I'll accept it. I can't do anything if I get arrested and jailed."
Even from detention in the Netherlands, Duterte won re-election as mayor of Davao City in May 2025, a sign that his political base remains intact even as international prosecutors pursue him.
A fugitive senator and a fractured government
After the gunfire subsided Wednesday, Dela Rosa fled the Senate building. Senator Robin Padilla accompanied him. By Thursday, the NBI had announced its nationwide manhunt.
Dela Rosa, for his part, reached out to the PNP and asked to be placed under its custody, not the NBI's. Aplasca, the acting PNP sergeant-at-arms, confirmed the contact. But the PNP clarified it would not arrest Dela Rosa, saying it lacked the authority to do so because the ICC had not formally presented it with a copy of the arrest warrant.
The result is a fugitive senator wanted by an international court, a national police force that says it cannot act, an investigative bureau that says it will hunt him down, and a president who says he had nothing to do with any of it. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court's 72-hour clock ticks on Marcos's response to Dela Rosa's petition.
Dela Rosa had described his relationship with Duterte in terms that suggested the former president gave him wide latitude. "He is leaving everything up to me," Dela Rosa said. That autonomy carried him from Davao City to the national police headquarters to the Senate floor. Now it has carried him into the crosshairs of an international tribunal, and into a legislative chamber where fifteen rounds were fired in the space of a single evening.
Governments that allow accountability to become a political weapon rather than a legal process tend to find that the weapon eventually turns on everyone.
What remains unanswered
The most basic questions about Wednesday's events remain unresolved. Who actually fired the fifteen shots? Were they aimed at anyone, or were they warning rounds? Did police or marines enter the Senate chamber itself, or were they turned back at the threshold? What authority, if any, did NBI agents have inside the chamber? And who is the individual arrested in connection with the shooting, and whose names did that person provide?
The competing accounts from the Senate secretary, the NBI, and the Marcos administration cannot all be true. Someone is not telling the truth about what happened inside that building.
When a country's legislature becomes a barricade, its police forces issue contradictory statements, and its president asks aloud whether the chaos is a destabilization plot, that country does not have a law enforcement problem. It has a governance crisis. And no international warrant, however justified, will resolve it from the outside.
