Guns, ammo and the aristocrat: how Hong Kong bank sting is connected to a Duterte drug war killing

More than 3,000 people have been killed since Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared the war on drugs that he believes is required to arrest his already threadbare country’s slide towards becoming a narco-state.

About a third of that number died at the hands of police, with the rest presumed to have been extra-judicial executions as Duterte’s “shoot first ask questions later” strategy results in the sort of body count you might expect from a state-sanctioned spree of score settling, informant disposal and vigilante bloodlust.

Among the deadly detritus of Duterte’s clean-up act, earlier this month, was the fully clothed and crumpled body of a 45-year-old woman lying on the side of a Manila street oozing blood, with a cardboard sign perched next to her that read: “drug pusher for celebrities”.

The woman was Maria Aurora Moynihan, a crystal-meth addicted, well-to-do member of Manila’s social elite and the daughter of a late, disgraced member of the British House of Lords – Antony, the 3rd Baron Moynihan.

Behind his daughter’s death in a Manila gutter lies the story of blue-blooded English aristocracy gone bad in a world of international drug traffickers, gun-running and wannabe spies with significant links to Hong Kong.

British peer Moynihan – the half-brother of Lord Colin Moynihan who served as sports minister in the cabinet of former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and was the former chairman of British Olympic Association – died aged 55 in 1991 after years on the run from the authorities in Britain.