ZAMBOANGA: Three police aides and a member of an Al-Qaeda-linked militant group were killed in a clash in the southern Philippines Thursday, the military said.
Abu Sayyaf militants ambushed a truck carrying the police aides on patrol at a rubber plantation on Basilan island at daybreak, said Colonel Ricardo Visaya, commander of a counter-terrorist task force in the area.
Three of the government men were killed and seven wounded, while their colleagues returned fire and shot dead one of the attackers, Visaya added.
"The Abu Sayyaf is engaged in extortion in this area. They are demanding 50,000 pesos ($1,200) a month from the owners of the rubber plantations," Visaya told reporters.
The police aides are local residents trained and armed by the government security forces to help defend remote communities from guerrilla and terror attacks.
The Abu Sayyaf, a small band of Islamic militants set up in the 1990s with seed money from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network, is based on remote southern islands and is responsible for the country's deadliest terror attacks.
The number of Abu Sayyaf fighters has dropped from roughly 2,000 a decade ago to a few hundred today, according to security analysts.
Visaya put their number on Basilan at 53 gunmen.
However they remain a threat in the south, capable of kidnapping locals and foreigners, as well as bomb attacks, partly due to support from members of local Muslim communities.
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