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Philippine police have arrested former president Rodrigo Duterte after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued a warrant accusing him of crimes against humanity over his deadly “war on drugs”.

Duterte was arrested by police in Manila airport shortly after his arrival from Hong Kong.

Duterte’s brutal anti-drugs crackdown, which occurred when he was president of the South East Asian nation from 2016 to 2022, saw thousands of people killed.

The 79-year-old had earlier said he was ready to go to prison, when responding to reports of his possible arrest.

The International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines called the arrest a “historic moment”.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but today, it has bent towards justice. Duterte’s arrest is the beginning of accountability for the mass killings that defined his brutal rule,” said ICHRP Chairperson Peter Murphy.

But Duterte’s former presidential spokesperson Salvador Panelo has slammed the arrest, saying it was “unlawful” as the Philippines had withdrawn from the ICC.

The ICC earlier said that it has jurisdiction in the Philippines over alleged crimes committed before the country withdrew as a member.

Duterte was in Hong Kong to campaign for his senatorial slate in the upcoming May 12 mid-term elections.

Footage aired on local television showed him walking out of the airport using a cane. Authorities say he is in “good health” and is being cared for by government doctors.

The ‘war on drugs’

Duterte, a former mayor of one of the country’s largest cities, swept to power on the promise of a widespread crackdown against crime.

With fiery rhetoric, he rallied security forces to shoot drug suspects dead. More than 6,000 suspects were gunned down by police or unknown assailants during the campaign, but rights groups say the number could be bigger.

“Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now there are three million drug addicts [in the Philippines]. I’d be happy to slaughter them,” he said a few months into office.

But critics said his “war on drugs” led to police abuse and that many of the drug suspects summarily executed.

Investigations in parliament pointed to shadowy “death squad” of bounty hunters targeting drug suspects.

Duterte has denied the allegations.

The ICC first took note of the alleged abuses in 2016 and started its investigation in 2021. It covered cases from November 2011, when Duterte was mayor of Davao, to March 2019, before the Philippines withdrew from the ICC.

Duterte cultivated an image of a tough-talking and anti-establishment man of the masses, endearing him to Filipinos who elected him as the country’s first president from the southern island of Mindanao.

His daughter, Sara Duterte, is the Philippines current vice-president and is tipped as a potential presidential candidate in 2028.

In recent months, the Duterte family’s alliance with incumbent President Ferdinand Marcos unraveled spectacularly before the public view, soon after Marcos and Sara Duterte won the 2022 elections by a landslide.

Marcos initially refused to co-operate with the ICC investigation, but as his relationship with the Duterte family deteriorated, he changed his stance, and later indicated that the Philippines would co-operate.

It is not clear yet whether Marcos would go as far as extraditing the former president to stand trial in The Hague.

Hackers thought to be working for the North Korean regime have successfully converted at least $300m (£232m) of their record-breaking $1.5bn crypto heist to unrecoverable funds.

The criminals, known as Lazarus Group, swiped the huge haul of digital tokens in a hack on crypto exchange ByBit two weeks ago.

Since then, it’s been a cat-and-mouse game to track and block the hackers from successfully converting the crypto into usable cash.

Experts say the infamous hacking team is working nearly 24 hours a day – potentially funnelling the money into the regime’s military development.

“Every minute matters for the hackers who are trying to confuse the money trail and they are extremely sophisticated in what they’re doing,” says Dr Tom Robinson, co-founder of crypto investigators Elliptic.

Out of all the criminal actors involved in crypto currency, North Korea is the best at laundering crypto, Dr Robinson says.

“I imagine they have an entire room of people doing this using automated tools and years of experience. We can also see from their activity that they only take a few hours break each day, possibly working in shifts to get the crypto turned into cash.”

Elliptic’s analysis tallies with ByBit, which says that 20% of the funds have now “gone dark”, meaning it is unlikely to ever be recovered.

The US and allies accuse the North Koreans of carrying out dozens of hacks in recent years to fund the regime’s military and nuclear development.

On 21 February the criminals hacked one of ByBit’s suppliers to secretly alter the digital wallet address that 401,000 Ethereum crypto coins were being sent to.

ByBit thought it was transferring the funds to its own digital wallet, but instead sent it all to the hackers.

Ben Zhou, the CEO of ByBit, assured customers that none of their funds had been taken.

The firm has since replenished the stolen coins with loans from investors, but is, in Zhou’s words, “waging war on Lazarus”.

ByBit’s Lazarus Bounty programme is encouraging members of the public to trace the stolen funds and get them frozen where possible.

All crypto transactions are displayed on a public blockchain, so it’s possible to track the money as it’s moved around by the Lazarus Group.

If the hackers try to use a mainstream crypto service to attempt to turn the coins into normal money like dollars, the crypto coins can be frozen by the company if they think they are linked to crime.

So far 20 people have shared more than $4m in rewards for successfully identifying $40m of the stolen money and alerting crypto firms to block transfers.

But experts are downbeat about the chances of the rest of the funds being recoverable, given the North Korean expertise in hacking and laundering the money.

“North Korea is a very closed system and closed economy so they created a successful industry for hacking and laundering and they don’t care about the negative impression of cyber crime,” Dr Dorit Dor from cyber security company Check Point said.

Another problem is that not all crypto companies are as willing to help as others.

Crypto exchange eXch is being accused by ByBit and others of not stopping the criminals cashing out.

More than $90m has been successfully funnelled through this exchange.

But over email the elusive owner of eXch – Johann Roberts – disputed that.

He admits they didn’t initially stop the funds, as his company is in a long-running dispute with ByBit, and he says his team wasn’t sure the coins were definitely from the hack.

He says he is now co-operating, but argues that mainstream companies that identify crypto customers are betraying the private and anonymous benefits of crypto currency.

North Korea has never admitted being behind the Lazarus Group, but is thought to be the only country in the world using its hacking powers for financial gain.

Previously the Lazarus Group hackers targeted banks, but have in the last five years specialised in attacking cryptocurrency companies.

The industry is less well protected with fewer mechanisms in place to stop them laundering the funds.

Recent hacks linked to North Korea include:

• The 2019 hack on UpBit for $41m
• The $275m theft of crypto from exchange KuCoin (most of the funds were recovered)
• The 2022 Ronin Bridge attack which saw hackers make off with $600m in crypto
• Approximately $100m in crypto was stolen in an attack on Atomic Wallet in 2023

In 2020, the US added North Koreans accused of being part of the Lazarus Group to its Cyber Most Wanted list. But the chances of the individuals ever being arrested are extremely slim unless they leave their country.

The United States’ stock market has shed more than $1.7 trillion in value after US President Donald Trump declined to rule out the possibility the economy could enter a recession this year.

The benchmark S&P 500 on Monday tumbled 2.7 percent, dragging the index nearly 9 percent below its all-time high reached on February 19.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 plunged 3.81 percent, its steepest single-day loss since September 2022.

The losses, which follow two weeks of steep declines, mean that the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 are now at their lowest levels since September.

Tesla, the electric car company run by Trump’s cost-cutting tsar, Elon Musk, racked up some of the steepest losses among individual firms, plunging 15.43 percent.

Asian stock markets piled on the losses on Tuesday morning, with Japan’s Nikkei 225 and Taiwan’s TAIEX dropping more than 2.5 percent and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng sliding about 1.5 percent.

The market rout comes as Trump’s back-and-forth tariff announcements have unnerved investors and stoked fears that the economy could be headed for a major slowdown or, at worst, a recession.

In an interview with Fox News that aired on Sunday, Trump left open the possibility of a downturn when asked if he expected a recession this year.

“I hate to predict things like that. There is a period of transition, because what we’re doing is very big,” Trump said. “We’re bringing wealth back to America. That’s a big thing…It takes a little time, but I think it should be great for us.”

“There’s total uncertainty in the market,” Steve Okun, founder and CEO of APAC Advisors in Singapore, told Al Jazeera.

“[Trump] has no credibility right now when it comes to tariffs, because of what he has done, in particular with Mexico and Canada. That’s why the markets are reacting the way they are – they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Trump last week slapped a 25 percent tariff on imports from Mexico and Canada and doubled the rate of duties on Chinese goods to 20 percent, only to announce two days later that he would postpone some duties on Mexican and Canadian goods until April 2.

A separate 25 percent tariff on imports of steel and aluminium is set to take effect on Wednesday.

Goldman Sachs economists last week raised its odds of a recession within the next 12 months from 15 percent to 20 percent, while JPMorgan Chase has lifted the probability from 30 percent to 40 percent “owing to extreme US policies.”

‘Indecisiveness, confusion and mixed messaging’
New York Stock Exchange trader Peter Tuchman described Monday’s trading session as a “bloodbath”.

“These stocks are being eaten away and this is obviously all over fear of a recession, right?” Tuchman said in a video posted on X.

“We had a roller coaster last week, we had some up days, we had some down days – and all a function of what is coming out of the Oval Office, which is just complete indecisiveness, confusion and mixed messaging and the investing community losing confidence in the whole situation.”

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who represents the state of Massachusetts, accused Trump of jeopardising the economy with his policies.

“We’re in real economic trouble thanks to the President, and right now, the stock market is a flashing warning light,” Warren said on X.

In a rare note of dissension with Trump among Republicans, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul also raised alarm about the stock rout.

“The stock market is comprised of millions of people who are simultaneously trading,” Paul said on X.

“The market indexes are a distillation of sentiment. When the markets tumble like this in response to tariffs, it pays to listen.”

In an interview with CNBC on Monday, Kevin Hassett, the head of Trump’s National Economic Council, played down concerns about the health of the economy as “blips in the data”.

“What I think that what’s going to happen is the first quarter is going to squeak into the positive category, and then the second quarter is going to take off as everybody sees the reality of the tax cuts,” Hasset said.