Jehovah's Witnesses beheaded by Filipino rebels

Just weeks after the American military boasted that it had crippled the Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf, the Filipino rebels left a grisly calling card yesterday: the heads of two Jehovah's Witnesses kidnapped two days earlier.

The two men were among six Filipinos abducted while travelling in a Jeep near the town of Patikul, on the troubled southern island of Jolo on Tuesday. Their heads were dumped with notes denouncing them as infidels. Guerrillas were still holding four hostages, all women.

The group had been selling Avon cosmetics and herbal teas door to door. Relatives denied they had been trying to proselytise on the predominantly Muslim island, although officials said they were carrying Bibles and Christian leaflets.

The murders and kidnappings are a serious blow to the Manila government and to the US, which sent 1,000 troops to the southern Philippines to train local security forces in counter-terrorism.

Most of the Americans left the southern island of Basilan last month, with US Navy Admiral Thomas Fargo, chief of the US Pacific Command, declaring that the crackdown had left Abu Sayyaf "in disarray and on the run". A different faction of the group, which has been linked to the al- Qa'ida terrorism network, operates on Jolo.

The Philippines army poured hundreds of troops into the Patikul area yesterday to search for the surviving hostages, who include Emily Mantic, whose husband Leonel was beheaded. The other victim was named as 21-year-old Lemuel Montulo. The military reinforcements included élite fighters trained by the Americans. For the second consecutive night, the army shelled suspected hideouts of Abu Sayyaf, which has committed mass kidnappings of Filipinos, as well as Americans and Europeans, in the past.

The group, which has frequently demanded ransoms, beheaded an American hostage, Guillermo Sobero, last year. An American missionary, Martin Burnham, was killed during a rescue raid in June.

The latest hostages were captured when two rebels armed with pistols stopped the Jehovah's Witnesses' Jeep and herded them into a forest. It was originally reported that eight people were abducted, but the other two occupants of the vehicle, both Muslims, were not abducted.

One kidnapper was identified by the driver as Muin Maulod Sahiron, a one-armed rebel regarded by some as a Robin Hood figure, who travels by horse and carries an Uzi submachinegun. Brigadier-General Romeo Tolentino, army commander on Jolo, said one head was found by residents at a fruit stall in a public market and the other on a dirt road leading to military headquarters in southern Jolo.

The attached notes called for an Islamic holy war, and one warned: "Those who do not believe in Allah will suffer the same fate." The abductions were the first by Abu Sayyaf since US forces arrived in the Philippines six months ago as part of the international "war on terror".

A military spokesman, Colonel Jose Mendoza, denied the guerrillas had proved they were still a force to be reckoned with. "What we have now in Jolo are splinter groups that are saying they are still around," he said. "They staged this abduction because they are feeling the pressure."