MANILA: An American man has been extradited to the Philippines to stand trial for the murder of a retired British policeman, the Filipino justice department said Tuesday.

Timothy Noah Kaufman is accused of murdering Joseph Balmer and his Filipino girlfriend, said Daniel Daganzo, head of the international operations division of the department’s National Bureau of Investigation.

Agents from the bureau flew Kaufman to Manila on Sunday, Daganzo told reporters, a month after the US justice department approved the Philippine government’s request that he stand trial in the Philippines.

Balmer, 54, and his 26-year-old girlfriend were found shot to death in the home of a friend of the Briton on the northern city of Angeles in September 2011, police records show.

Witnesses named Kaufman as among three suspects, Daganzo said.

Philippine authorities arrested a second suspect, a Filipino, in March last year while a second American suspect remains unaccounted for, Daganzo said.

The motive for the attack was not known.

A Philippine army major and two of his men have been killed in an ambush by guerrillas opposed to peace talks, authorities said Tuesday.

The officer and two soldiers were in civilian clothing and driving an unmarked pickup truck when they were waylaid along a national highway on the southern island of Mindanao on Monday, regional military spokesman Col. Dickson Hermoso said.

“They were on a personal trip when they were halted and shot at,” Hermoso added.

Bomb injures 17

Philippine police say a bomb exploded on a pedestrian overpass in a southern town threatened by rebels in the past, wounding at least 17 people.

Police Senior Inspector Jarwin Castroberde says soldiers defused two other bombs near the scene of the first blast late Sunday in the farming town of Kabacan in North Cotabato province.

Four of the victims were brought to a hospital in critical condition, according to Kabacan official David Saure.

Castroberde says investigators were trying to identify the attackers but the suspects include breakaway guerrillas opposed to a peace deal between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the largest insurgent group in the south.

A few hundred hard-line guerrillas have continued occasional attacks in pursuit of a separate homeland for minority Muslims.