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Manila. The Philippine military said it killed Southeast Asia’s most-wanted terrorist and two other senior militants on Thursday in a US-backed airstrike.

Philippine troops did not immediately recover bodies from the dawn strike targeting a militant stronghold on a southern Philippine island, but military spokesman Col. Marcelo Burgos said the dead included Malaysian Zulkifi bin Hir, also known as Marwan, a top leader of the regional, Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist network.

Also killed in the strike were the leader of the Philippines-based Abu Sayyaf militants, Umbra Jumdail, and a Singaporean leader in Jemaah Islamiyah, Abdullah Ali, who used the guerrilla name Muawiyah, Burgos said.

Forensic investigators could not immediately access the heavily forested mountain camp hit in the strike because the area remains under the control of another rebel group, the Moro National Liberation Front, which signed a peace pact with the government in 1996, said military commander Maj. Gen. Noel Coballes.

He said that no one was captured following Thursday’s airstrike and that some militants escaped and then returned to retrieve the bodies of those who had died. It is unclear if they also recovered the bodies of the three leaders, he said.

About 30 militants were in the camp near Parang town on Jolo Island, the stronghold of the Abu Sayyaf and their allies from the mostly Indonesian-based Jemaah Islamiyah, when it was bombarded by two OV10 aircraft at 3 a.m., Coballes said.

“Our report is there were at least 15 killed, including their three leadership,” he said. “This is a deliberate, fully planned attack coming from our forces.”

The United States had offered a $5 million reward for the capture of Marwan, a US-trained engineer accused of involvement in a number of deadly bombings in the Philippines and in the training of new militants.

American counterterrorism troops have helped ill-equipped Filipino troops track Marwan for years using satellite and drone surveillance. About 600 US special forces troops have been deployed in the southern Philippines since 2002.

If confirmed, Marwan’s death would mark the most important success against regional terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah since the January 2011 arrest of Indonesian suspect Umar Patek in Pakistan’s garrison town of Abbottabad, where Osama bin Laden was killed in a US commando attack four months later.

Patek and Marwan collaborated with the Abu Sayyaf in training militants in bomb-making skills, seeking funding locally and abroad and plotting attacks, including against US troops in the southern Philippines.

Patek is believed to have traveled back to Indonesia then onward to Pakistan, leaving Marwan to take charge in the southern Philippines.

Associated Press