Agencies/Manila

Two Philippine coast guard men held hostage by Al Qaeda-linked militants sprinted through gunfire to freedom as government forces raided the extremists’ hideout, killing 15 of them, the army said yesterday.
Gringo Villaruz and Allan Pagaling slipped separately from the Abu Sayyaf camp on Wednesday night and raced through the jungle as their captors engaged in a gun battle with an elite military force, said military spokesman Colonel Noel Detoyato.
“Apparently at the height of the encounter, the two coast guard men were able to flee,” he told reporters in Manila.
The men, who were abducted in May along with another hostage who was later beheaded, sought refuge at a village about 1.5km away, said captain Antonio Bulao, spokesman of the unit involved in the clash.
Found an hour apart, they did not know of each other’s escape until they saw one another yesterday at a local military hospital, where they were treated for bruises, he told Agence France-Presse.
Yasser Igasan, one of the group’s most senior leaders, was believed to have escaped after the firefight, he added.
Fifteen Abu Sayyaf gunmen were killed, but the remains of only five were recovered as the rest were carried away by their comrades, he said. Several soldiers sustained minor injuries.
As many as 200 Abu Sayyaf members were involved in the fighting that was so fierce, the military had to use artillery to drive the extremists back, Detoyato said.
“It was a long fight: one hour and 35 minutes. That is unusual because they normally disengage immediately,” he observed, without offering a theory for the change in tactic.
 The army this week launched a risky attempt to rescue 11 hostages—including Villaruz and Pagaling as well as two Malaysians, a Dutchman and a South Korean—after the militants beheaded a 12th captive, Rodolfo Boligao.
 The two coast guard men were abducted in the southern port city of Dapitan, some 250km from Jolo, in May along with Boligao, a village official.
All three were later shown shirtless and blindfolded in videos that circulated on social media, with a masked person behind them menacingly holding a machete to their necks.
Boligao’s decapitated remains were found on a dark Jolo highway last week after the government rejected the Abu Sayyaf’s unspecified ransom demand.
Bulao said that Villaruz and Pagaling told authorities four other hostages were held with them, including a Malaysian and a Korean. He said the military would continue efforts to free all the hostages.
l Separate fighting in neighboring Basilan island yesterday left five Abu Sayyaf members and one soldier killed, the military said.
Impoverished Jolo and Basilan are known strongholds of the Abu Sayyaf, a loose band of several hundred armed men set up in the 1990s with seed money from the Al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.
 The group engages in kidnappings to finance operations, often targeting foreigners and sometimes beheading captives if ransom is not paid.  It has also been blamed for the worst bomb attacks in the country, including the firebombing of a ferry off Manila Bay in 2004 that killed more than 100 people.