Beheading suspects flee ahead of police raid in Basilan

GUINANTA (AFP) - Hundreds of heavily-armed police swept into this village Tuesday to arrest Muslim separatists accused of killing and beheading Philippine soldiers but the suspects were gone along with all the residents.

An AFP photographer joined the 300-man task force in this remote southern farming village on Basilan island as they tried to serve arrest warrants against three of the 130 suspects.

The suspects, all alleged Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) rebels, were accused of killing 14 marines and beheading 10 of them on July 10. The soldiers had strayed into an MILF area while searching for a kidnapped Italian Roman Catholic priest, who has since been freed unharmed elsewhere.

However nearly 6,000 residents of Guinanta and three other nearby villages fled after the killings in fear of being caught up in a military assault, and not one resident could be found Tuesday.

"We knocked on three houses but there was nobody there," said Basilan provincial police chief Superintendent Macapantar Salik.

"We also went to a suspected MILF camp nearby, but it was abandoned as well," he added.

Police officers serving warrants went to the area amid heavy rain in a convoy of 10 vehicles backed by an armoured troop transport with mounted machineguns. They had to hike the final 1.5 kilometres (about a mile) because roads did not reach that far.

Salik told AFP the task force would visit the villages of the other suspects to try to find and arrest them.

"If they resist arrest we are prepared to fight. If need be, we can call on our counterparts in the armed forces for reinforcements," the police official added.

President Gloria Arroyo had suspended a planned punitive military operation against the MILF on Basilan to allow for the arrest of the suspects.

The 12,000-member MILF, which has been observing a three-year truce with Manila amid efforts to bring a negotiated end to decades of insurgency in the southern third of the archipelago, has said its forces killed the marines.

But the Muslim separatists have denied mutilating the bodies of the marines and rejected a military demand to turn over those behind the attack.

The action against the MILF was delayed until Tuesday following a warning by Japan and Canada that they would halt their aid programmes in the south if the fighting escalated.