Sara Duterte is the daughter of former president, Rodrigo Duterte, well known for his police-enforced anti-drugs crackdown when he was in power.
Security protocols in the Philippines have been stepped up after vice president Sara Duterte vowed to have the president assassinated if she herself were killed.
The daughter of the country’s previous president Rodrigo Duterte, the politician said she had contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the House of Representatives speaker.
Speaking in an online briefing, she said: “I have talked to a person. I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM [the nickname of Philippine President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr], Liza Araneta [the first lady], and Martin Romualdez [the speaker and the president’s second cousin]. No joke. No joke.”
The 46-year-old lawyer went on: “I said, do not stop until you kill them, and then he said yes.”
She was responding to an online commenter urging her to stay safe when staying in the lower chamber of Congress overnight with her chief of staff.
Under the Philippine penal code, such public remarks may constitute a crime of threatening to inflict a wrong on a person or his family and is punishable by a jail term and fine.
In October, Ms Duterte accused President Marcos of incompetence and said she had imagined cutting his head off.
The country’s executive secretary Lucas Bersamin described her latest comments as an “active threat” against the president and said an elite presidential guards force would prepare “for immediate proper action”.
“Acting on the vice president’s clear and unequivocal statement that she had contracted an assassin to kill the president if an alleged plot against her succeeds, the executive secretary has referred this active threat to the Presidential Security Command for immediate proper action,” a government statement said.
It went on: “Any threat to the life of the president must always be taken seriously, more so that this threat has been publicly revealed in clear and certain terms.”
The comments are the latest in a rift between Ms Duterte and President Marcos, who both hail from powerful political families in the Southeast Asian nation.