In October 2016, as Philippine police were in the thick of their war against illegal drugs, a little girl was found in a dark corner of a cemetery in a Manila suburb. Her skull was broken, her underwear removed, and her body lifeless. Her name was Maria Nila Ramos. She was seven. That same evening she was found, the girl, fondly called Ella by her family, was raped and murdered.

It had been months since the gruesome crime took place when I met Ella’s father, Roberto. But there was no hiding the anguish and anger in his eyes. He knew the suspect, Jay-Ar “Ai-Ai” Payawal, and even treated him like family.

“I trusted him. He was my other daughter’s godfather. But what he did to Ella was inhuman. He treated her worse than an animal,” Roberto told me.

It was drugs, he said, that changed Ai-Ai, and that led to his criminal behavior. If Ai-Ai were to be gunned down by masked men, Roberto said it would be well-deserved.

How can you argue with a hurting father? And with thousands of murders and homicides each year, imagine how many Roberto Ramoses there are in the Philippines. Imagine how many Filipinos have been feeling unsafe for years.

The numbers were more than enough to catapult Rodrigo Duterte – a former mayor already known for his bloody campaign against narcotics and crime in the southern city of Davao – to the presidency. A year into his term, those numbers have consistently sustained his and his war on drugs’ popularity.

Better drug addicts and dealers – perceived to be responsible for most crimes in the country – killed than innocent victims, many Filipinos argued.

And so the bodies kept piling. I remember the first night we staked out at the Manila Police District. It was brimming with journalists. There was hardly anywhere to park but whenever news came of a murder scene, press vehicles filed out of the police station like clockwork. At past midnight, we were a convoy of at least a dozen vehicles crisscrossing Manila traffic.

We arrived at the first of what would be many crime scenes in what has now been our year-long coverage of Duterte’s war on drugs. I don’t think I can ever erase the image in my head: A body bathing in its own blood, slumped on a motorbike, gunned down.

Moments after we arrived, the victim's grandmother, Josephine Cabalquinto, emerged from the crowd. She had no doubt the murder was drug-related.

“He used to do drugs, I won’t deny that,” Josephine said, “but he’s stopped. All he did lately was work. I saw the change. You see it in the eyes.”

It’s a line that I’d be hearing over and over again from families and friends of suspected drug users and pushers who’ve been killed in the course of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs – that they’ve changed or have voluntarily surrendered, only to be killed either by masked gunmen or police.

There was Christian Cartagena, who witnesses say was taken by three men and was later found dumped in an empty lot with his skull broken. Or Domingo Mañosca, also an Oplan Tokhang surrenderer, who was shot dead in his home alongside his five-year-old son.

Oplan Tokhang is the police anti-drug operation that has become almost synonymous with Duterte’s war on drugs. By definition, it should be harmless. Tokhang is a Filipino word that means knock and plead, and that’s exactly what police leadership say their men have been doing for the most part.

We went with cops in one such operation. What we saw were hardly voluntary surrenders. Police had no warrants but they entered homes and took drug suspects into their custody, made them sign papers and swear to never touch illegal drugs again. Just recently, they raided bars along a university belt in suburban Manila, where they searched patrons’ bags for drugs and guns - again, without warrants. Yet they claim more than a million suspected drug users and dealers have surrendered since Duterte took office in July 2016, an achievement they lament critics don’t see.

But critics ask why so many of those who’ve surrendered under Oplan Tokhang have ended up dead. The figures have been confusing. In December 2016, the country’s police chief, Ronald dela Rosa, himself said 6,000 have died as a result of the drug war.

 “We’re not saying that those mysterious killings are ours. It’s our job but they were killed as a consequence of our war on drugs, either they rode on or went along at the same time with our drug war, but that’s still someone’s life, they were still killed.”

However, in March 2017, Gen. dela Rosa said only 1,398 homicide cases have been determined to be drug-related. At that time, he said the motive behind 3,785 other cases had yet to be determined. By the end of July, homicide cases have ballooned to more than 14,000, with only over 2,100 found to be drug-related, while more than 9,100 were still under investigation.

 We’ve spoken with three assassins in the past year. They all said they’ve killed more people since Duterte took office than they did in the last few years. One claimed he was a vigilante working for a politician; the other two claimed to be working for cops.

“In the past, it was only drug pushers who couldn’t remit payment or bribes that were getting killed. When Duterte became president, dirty cops would have dealers killed before these dealers could implicate them as protectors of those in the drug trade,” a man who identified himself to us only as “Jun” said.

One thing is clear. More Filipinos are getting killed.

(In part two of this series, CGTN’s Barnaby Lo takes a deeper look into police anti-drug raids and the controversial deaths that have resulted thus far.