Abu Sayyaf leaders Puruji Indama and Isnilon Hapilon, who were being targeted by the military operation, have not been captured and are on the run
The death toll in fighting between Muslim rebels and soldiers in the southern
Government forces launched the operation Friday to capture two
top leaders of the Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group (ASG) blamed for beheadings
and kidnappings, but failed to apprehend any of them.
"Puruji Indama and Isnilon Hapilon are on the run," Brigadier-General
Carlito Galvez, the military commander for Basilan island, told reporters.
The military
operation against the ASG was launched in response to the recent extortion and
kidnapping incidents that had been reported. The primary objective of the
operation was to arrest Indama, according to Captain Maria Rowena Muyuela,
public information officer of the military's Western Mindanao Command.
ASG members were
said to be occupying school buildings in Barangay Baguindan and reportedly
extorting from people involved in the ongoing construction of the Magkawa-Albarka Road ,
Muyuela said.
Galvez said the
last firefight between about 80 gunmen and soldiers ceased in Basilan, around
900 kilometers (560 miles) south of the Philippine capital Manilaon Friday night,
but the operation was ongoing.
Captain Jefferson
Mamauag, a local Philippine army spokesman, said 7 Abu Sayyaf fighters had been
killed, with authorities now searching for their burial sites.
Two soldiers were
shot dead and 28 others were wounded by grenade blasts, Mamauag added,
correcting an earlier military report that put their casualties at two dead and
29 wounded.
And he said 3
members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the main Muslim guerrilla
force in the region, were also killed Friday, their bodies as yet unrecovered.
MILF fighting
alongside gov't
The MILF
militants were fighting alongside Philippine troops, according to Alton
Angeles, municipal planning officer of the town where most of the fighting
occurred, under their top Basilan leader, Hamza Sapanton.
Indama, Abu
Sayyaf's chief, has a bounty of P3.3 million (US$74,500) on his head and has
been blamed for holding foreigners for ransom in the south over the years. He
is notorious for beheading and mutilating victims.
Hapilon is under
a $5 million bounty set by the US
government, which accuses him of kidnapping a group of holidaymakers, including
3 Americans, on the western island
of Palawan in May 2001.
Two were killed
in captivity, one of them beheaded, while a third, the wife of one of the men
murdered, was rescued by Philippine forces 13 months later.
The Abu Sayyaf is
a self-styled Islamic militant group set up in the 1990s with seed money from
the late Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, and has been blamed for the worst
terror attacks in the country's history, including bombings.
MILF vice chairman
Ghazali Jaafar said the rebel leadership had yet to receive any report of MILF
casualties.
"It's
possible people got killed because there was a firefight," Jaafar told AFP
by telephone.
He said the MILF
has a long-standing arrangement with the government to help government forces
pursue kidnappers.
This was part of
confidence-building measures that led to a peace treaty last month that would see the MILF end more than
40 years of fighting and take the reins of power in a planned autonomous
region.
The military said
its operation was unrelated to the search for a Chinese tourist and a Filipina worker kidnapped allegedly by the Abu
Sayyaf at a Malaysian dive resort on April 2.
http://www.rappler.com/news/55342-12-dead-philippine-rebel-clashes-end-military
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