The Philippines will not allow US troops to go into combat against Muslim rebels, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said today, a day after a bomb at a southern airport killed 21 people, including an American.
A man identified as an Abu Sayyaf leader by the ABS-CBN television network said in a telephone interview his group had carried out yesterday's attack in Davao.
But military officials were sceptical, saying the Abu Sayyaf - blacklisted by Washington as a terrorist group with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network - was engaging in propaganda.
Underscoring fears of a wave of attacks, a small home-made bomb exploded today but caused no casualties at a grocery store in Cotabato, about 170 kilometres west of Davao.
The Philippines is fighting four rebel groups seeking an Islamic state in the south of the country.
American help includes a team of US special forces now training local units in counter-terrorism tactics in the city of Zamboanga, but the Philippine constitution explicitly bans foreign troops from engaging in combat.
Ms Arroyo, who condemned the Davao airport bombing as a "brazen act of terrorism which will not go unpunished", appeared to be heading off suspicions that the attack could be used as a pretext to escalate the role of the U.S. soldiers. The death toll from yesterday's, which tore into dozens of people huddled in an airport shelter during a downpour as they waited for arriving friends and relatives, rose to 21 when an 18-year-old man died of his wounds today, doctors said.
Police said 114 people were wounded, several dozen of them seriously by shards of metal and glass.