MANILA, Philippines — Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte said Saturday she has contracted an assassin to kill the president, his wife and the House of Representatives speaker if she herself is killed, in a public threat that she warned was not a joke.

Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin referred the “active threat” against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to an elite presidential guards force “for immediate proper action.” It was not immediately clear what actions would be taken against Duterte.

The Presidential Security Command immediately boosted Marcos’ security and said it considered the vice president’s threat, which was “made so brazenly in public,” a national security issue.

The security force said it was “coordinating with law enforcement agencies to detect, deter and defend against any and all threats to the president and the first family.”

Marcos ran with Duterte as his vice presidential running mate in the May 2022 elections; both won with landslide victories on a campaign call of national unity.

The leaders and their camps, however, rapidly had a bitter falling-out over key differences, including in their approaches to China’s aggressive actions in the disputed South China Sea. Duterte resigned from the Marcos Cabinet in June as education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body.

Like her equally outspoken father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, the vice president became a vocal critic of Marcos, his wife, Liza Araneta-Marcos, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez, the president’s ally and cousin, accusing them of corruption, incompetence and politically persecuting the Duterte family and its close supporters.

Her latest tirade was set off by the decision by House members allied with Romualdez and Marcos to detain her chief of staff, Zuleika Lopez, who was accused of hampering a congressional inquiry into the possible misuse of her budget as vice president and education secretary. Lopez was later transferred to a hospital after falling ill and wept when she heard of a plan to temporarily lock her up in a women’s prison.

In a predawn online news conference, an angry Duterte accused Marcos of incompetence as a president and of being a liar, along with his wife and the House speaker, in expletive- laden remarks.

When asked about concerns over her security, the 46-year-old lawyer suggested there was an unspecified plot to kill her. “Don’t worry about my security because I’ve talked with somebody. I said, ‘If I’m killed, you’ll kill BBM, Liza Araneta and Martin Romualdez. No joke, no joke,’ ” she said without elaborating and using the initials that many use for the president.

“I’ve given my order, ‘If I die, don’t stop until you’ve killed them.’ And he said ‘yes.’ ”

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.

Amid the political divisions, military chief Gen. Romeo Brawner issued a statement with an assurance that the 160,000-member Armed Forces of the Philippines would remain nonpartisan “with utmost respect for our democratic institutions and civilian authority.”

“We call for calm and resolve,” Brawner said. “We reiterate our need to stand together against those who will try to break our bonds as Filipinos.”

When Duterte’s father was a city mayor and later president, a police-enforced anti-drugs crackdown left thousands of mostly petty drug suspects dead in killings that the International Criminal Court has been investigating as a possible crime against humanity.

The former president denied authorizing extrajudicial killings under his crackdown but has given conflicting statements. He told a public Senate inquiry last month that he had maintained a “death squad” of gangsters to kill other criminals when he was mayor of southern Davao city.