ZAMBOANGA CITY, 13 July 2005 — Seven people had been killed in separate fighting in the southern Philippines, where security forces were pursuing members of Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah extremists, officials said yesterday.

Two soldiers died after a gunman attacked a military outpost yesterday in Tacurong town of Sultan Kudarat province. The attacker was subsequently killed by pursuing soldiers, said Major Onting Alon, a spokesman for the army’s 6th Infantry Division. “The motive of the attack was still unknown,” he said.

Alon said four Abu Sayyaf gunmen were also killed and three soldiers wounded in fierce fighting in the jungle village of Tamar in Talayan town, Maguindanao province.

The provinces of Sultan Kudarat and Maguindanao in the southern island of Mindanao are two of the strongholds of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the biggest Philippine Muslim armed group fighting for an independent Islamic state .

A military statement said the MILF, which is engaged in peace talks with the government, is providing valuable information on the location of the Abu Sayyaf rebels.

MILF leaders have vowed to help weed out of extremists in Mindanao, who have been blamed for the bombings and kidnapping of foreign tourists and local businessmen and priests in the southern Philippines.

The MILF last month ejected Janjalani’s group from its strongholds in Mindanao as part of confidence-building measures before peace talks with the Philippine government which will resume in Kuala Lumpur this month.

The Abu Sayyaf group is on the US State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations and Washington has offered up to five million dollars for the arrest of any of its leaders. It was founded in the early 1990s by Afghan-trained militant Abubakar Abdurajak Janjalani, who in 1998 was killed in a gunbattle with police. He was succeeded by his brother Khadafy as overall chief of the group, which specializes in kidnapping foreign hostages, extortion and random bombings.

The group has been blamed for some of the country’s worst terror attacks, including the firebombing of a passenger ferry in Manila Bay that killed more than 100 people last year.

Intelligence officials around the region have said that the Abu Sayyaf once received funding from Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda, allegedly channeled through Islamic charitable institutions.