MANILA: Philippine police arrested 49 people suspected of hurling rocks, bottles and firebombs at officers and blocking heavily guarded roads and bridges leading to the presidential palace Sunday while a peaceful anti-corruption rally took place in the capital, officials and witnesses said.

The melee outside the country’s seat of power unfolded as more than 33,000 other protesters rallied in a historic park and at a democracy monument in Manila.

They expressed outrage over a corruption scandal involving lawmakers, officials and construction company owners who allegedly pocketed huge kickbacks from flood-control projects in the impoverished Southeast Asian country that is regularly buffeted by storms and typhoons.

The hours-long rampage by about 100 mostly club-wielding people, some of whom waved Philippine flags and displayed cardboard posters with anti-corruption slogans, wounded about 70 Manila law enforcers, according to the Manila police. Schools were canceled due to the violence.

Police said they deployed tear gas to try to disperse the attackers, who sprayed graffiti on walls, toppled steel posts, shattered glass panels and ransacked the lobby of a budget inn along a busy road lined with university campuses, banks and restaurants before dispersing at night.

Hours after the assault, police had yet to identify the attackers, some of whom carried black flags with a skull-and-crossbones caricature.

It was also unclear if they had earlier participated in the peaceful protests before heading toward the presidential office. It was not immediately known if President Marcos Jr. was in the Malacanang presidential palace during the chaos.

Police said in a statement after the arrests that the situation was “contained” but warned that violence and vandalism would not be tolerated.

Protesting corruption

“I feel bad that we wallow in poverty and we lose our homes, our lives and our future while they rake in a big fortune from our taxes that pay for their luxury cars, foreign trips and bigger corporate transactions,” student activist Althea Trinidad told The Associated Press in Manila.

Trinidad lives in Bulacan, a flood-prone province north of Manila where officials said the most flood-control projects were being investigated either as substandard or nonexistent.

“Our purpose is not to destabilize but to strengthen our democracy,” Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David, the head of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, said in a statement. He called on the public to demonstrate peacefully and demand accountability.

Marcos first highlighted the flood-control corruption scandal in July in his annual state of the nation speech.

He later established an independent commission to investigate what he said were anomalies in many of the 9,855 flood-control projects worth more than 545 billion pesos ($9.5 billion) that were supposed to have been undertaken since he took office in mid-2022. He called the scale of corruption “horrible” and accepted his public works secretary's resignation.

Public outrage erupted when a wealthy couple who ran several construction companies that won lucrative flood-control project contracts showed dozens of European and American luxury cars they owned during media interviews. The fleet included a British luxury car costing 42 million pesos ($737,000) that they said they bought because it came with a free umbrella.

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Philippine police arrest dozens in anti-corruption protest clashes