Two Filipino soldiers killed in clash with separatists

MANILA: Two Philippines soldiers and an unknown number of guerrillas opposed to the government’s peace deal with the country’s largest Muslim rebel group were killed in a clash Thursday, the military said.

Fighting broke out in the south a day after President Benigno Aquino asked Congress to pass a Muslim autonomy law for the region, a key step to ending a decades-old rebellion that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

About 20 BIFF rebels opened fire on a military detachment late Wednesday, then attacked an army unit sent out to confront them early Thursday, said Maj. Gen. Edmundo Pangilinan, an army commander on the major southern island of Mindanao where the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF) operates.

The rebels killed two soldiers and wounded six others, he told reporters by telephone.
He said residents recounted to the military seeing up to 10 rebels dead in Thursday’s two-hour gunbattle, though no guerrilla bodies were recovered.

If the death toll is accurate, it would be the deadliest clash in Mindanao involving the BIFF since July, when 17 rebels and a soldier were killed in a single day.

The BIFF split from the main Muslim rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), in 2008.
The 10,000-strong MILF signed a peace agreement with the Aquino government in March with the aim of creating an autonomous region for Muslim-dominated areas in the south of the largely Catholic nation.

However the BIFF, which is believed to have just a few hundred fighters, has rejected the agreement and vowed to fight on for a separate state in the southern Philippines.
Canadian Muslim preacher arrested

A Canadian Islamic preacher has been detained in the Philippines, where authorities deemed him a potential threat to national security, the immigration bureau said Thursday.

Jamaican-born Abu Ameenah Bilal Philips, who grew up in Canada, was arrested in the southern Philippine city of Davao on Sunday shortly after his arrival there and would now be deported.
“Philippine government agencies asked us to deport him because he could be a potential threat to national security,” bureau spokeswoman Elaine Tan told AFP.

Tan said the bureau was aware Philips had been blacklisted by a number of other countries. The Canadian Embassy said it was unable to comment due to privacy laws. Philips was the second Islamic convert preacher to be detained by the Philippines since July, when it also arrested Robert Edward Cerantonio to Australia.