PHILIPPINES President Rodrigo Duterte urged Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi today to ignore human rights campaigners who criticise her military’s attacks on the country’s Muslims.

Mr Duterte told businesspeople in New Delhi, where he and Ms Suu Kyi are attending an international summit, that activists against state murder were “just a noisy bunch.”

Ms Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace prize laureate, has presided over military persecution of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority, to which Myanmar denies citizenship.

Roughly 700,000 have fled their homes to neighbouring Bangladesh.

While the Rohingya have long been persecuted and killed by Buddhist extremists, the army crackdown that began in August has greatly increased the violence.

Doctors Without Borders said that at least 6,700 people, including 730 children, were killed by violence In the first month and another 2,700 died of disease and malnutrition.

Mr Duterte is waging his own violent campaign against poor Filipinos under the guise of a “war on drugs.”

Left-wing party Akbayan says that police have killed at least 3,900 people since July 2016 and vigilante murders take the toll to roughly 14,000.