Government troops fought intense battles yesterday with Islamic rebels holding mainly child hostages on a southern island of the Philippines, but the attempt to rescue the 27 captives came to nothing.
Gen Jose Calimlim, the armed forces' deputy chief and intelligence head, said government troops controlled 95 per cent of the rebel camp on the island of Basilan. The hostages and surviving rebels are believed to be in a concrete-reinforced tunnel in the camp, and troops are advancing cautiously to avoid harming the captives, said Gen Calimlim.
He said the guerrillas, who are fighting for an Islamic state in the south of this mostly Catholic country, abandoned guns, sacks of rice and other equipment in their retreat into the tunnel.
The hostages, all Filipinos and held for more than a month, include 22 children and five adults, one a Catholic priest.
"We suspect the remaining rebels have gone inside a tunnel that is 200 metres long and taken the hostages with them," the general said. "We still have to search the tunnel," he added. "We haven't recovered the hostages . . . There is no contact with them or with the rebels."
Elsewhere, the government's chief hostage negotiator said soldiers had surrounded rebels holding another 21 captives, including 10 foreign tourists, but repeated his warning against military intervention.
And, in a further move indicating a widening of religious conflict, the largest Muslim group fighting for an Islamic state in the south suspended peace talks, blaming the government for violating a ceasefire.
"The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) hereby unilaterally declares that the . . . peace talks [are] indefinitely suspended," said an MILF declaration.
In response Mr Ricardo Puno, presidential press secretary, said: "The lines are still open."
The military has said about 300 MILF guerrillas and more than 30 soldiers have died in clashes which started in mid-March after the rebels seized and briefly occupied a town hall in Lanao del Norte province on Mindanao island, 800km south of Manila.
The MILF is the larger of the two groups fighting for Muslim self-rule in the violence-stricken southern region. The Abu Sayyaf, the smaller but more radical group, is holding the two sets of hostages.
In the hostage crisis involving foreign tourists, the regional governor, Mr Nur Misuari, a former rebel, threatened to end negotiations unless the guerrillas started releasing the captives.
"These people . . . are already literally encircled from all sides," Mr Misuari said, adding this was a tactical move intended to limit the movements of the guerrillas.
"Either we expedite the release of these people or we terminate the negotiations," he said, adding that negotiations, which have not formally begun, should be completed quickly. The hostages were taken from Malaysia last Sunday and are being kept on Jolo island, 960km south of the capital, Manila. The mountainous island is a stronghold of the Abu Sayyaf.
Mr Misuari said his emissaries had reported that most of the hostages had diarrhoea and one of the Finnish hostages had a bleeding ulcer. "The Europeans don't like to eat rice . . . They were asking for bread," he added. A local official said one of the kidnappers had gone to Jolo town last week to buy jam and bread.
The hostages include 10 Malaysians, three Germans, two French nationals, two South Africans, two Finns, one Lebanese and a Filipina woman.