Remulla said Dela Rosa “is safe. He is with security personnel. He has been informed of our activities. We have assured him that there is no warrant of arrest to be served.”
President Ferdinand Marcos jnr said government forces inside and around the Senate complex were not responsible for the gunfire.
He said agents trying to arrest Dela Rosa had been instructed to stand down after the Supreme Court had earlier ordered the Government to explain its actions.
He said: “The thing to do now is to tell all our people to calm down and we will get to the bottom of this. We will determine who is behind this trouble.”
Dela Rosa had earlier asked the Supreme Court to stop the authorities from arresting and handing him over to the ICC.
Dela Rosa, known as “Bato”, served as national police chief from 2016 to 2018 during the early phase of Duterte’s anti-drug campaign.
The crackdown left thousands of people dead, many of them drug users and low-level narcotics peddlers, according to human rights monitors.
Duterte was arrested in March last year, flown to the Netherlands on the same day, and is detained in The Hague awaiting trial.
Dela Rosa had not been seen publicly since November before emerging on Monday to take part in an unexpected vote that helped Duterte loyalists capture control of the Senate.
Minutes before the gunfire, Senator Vicente Sotto said in a statement that protesters threw water bottles at his car as he drove alone out of the Senate complex.
Earlier on Wednesday, Dela Rosa had appealed to the military to oppose attempts to detain him, urging former colleagues to resist any move by Marcos’ Government to hand him over to the ICC.
Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano, who had stopped government agents from arresting his ally, said on his official Facebook page he did not know who had fired the shots.
- AFP
