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by Jason Gutierrez

MANILA, Feb 19 (AFP) - The Philippine government has released gory video footage of Muslim gunmen beheading captured Filipino soldiers in a move meant to quash opposition to joint US operations to crush the kidnap gang.

Aired over at least two leading television networks late Monday, the footage shows Abu Sayyaf gunmen armed with machetes questioning a soldier, his hands tied and kneeling on the ground.

The soldier was asked to pray as a rebel later approached from behind, and with one swift swing, chopped off the man's head. Another wounded soldier sprawled on the ground was also beheaded, as cameraman barked instructions.

Press Undersecretary Roberto Capco said the amateurish videotape was recovered by troops after overrunning an Abu Sayyaf camp in Basilan island, where the gunmen are still holding hostage a US Christian missionary couple Martin and Gracia Burnham and a Filipina nurse.

The videotape, which includes scenes shot way back in 1994, has been in the custody of the government in the past several years, Capco said.

Initial reaction to the footage in this largely Roman Catholic nation was of shock but Capco said the government decided to release the tape in a bid to quell opposition to the joint US-Philippine operations against the Abu Sayyaf.

The exercises launched last month against the group, linked by both governments to the al-Qaeda terror network of Osama bin Laden, involves some 660 US troops, some of whom would be deployed in batches over the next several months in Basilan.

While independent surveys show there is widespread public support for the exercises, some sectors, including opposition senators and leftwing groups, have criticised it as another form of colonization.

"There was an encounter between the Abu Sayyaf and the soldiers in Basilan, and it so happened they captured several soldiers. There is one portion there showing the Abu Sayyaf finishing off a nearly dead soldier by chopping off his head," Capco said over DZRH radio.

"The tape was recovered by our military in one raid in an Abu Sayyaf camp," he said, but did not give details.

Experts who analysed the footage said it was taken by a camera system used largely in Europe and the Middle East, Capco said.

The footage was apparently meant as a propaganda material by the Abu Sayyaf to show their "sponsors abroad that they are winning against our military," he said.

"We are studying if this evidence can prove that the al-Qaeda helped the Abu Sayyaf."

Beheading captives is a "terror trademark" of the Abu Sayyaf, a group founded in the early 1990s and which means "Bearer of the Sword."

Among their recent victims were Californian Guillermo Sobero and 14 Filipino mostly Christian farmers seized in a kidnapping spree last year. Sobero's decapitated head was found in a shallow grave in a Basilan jungle.

In 1994, only a few years after it was founded by an Afghan-trained firebrand named Abdurajak Janjalani, the group shot dead 15 civilian hostages in Basilan and beheaded several of them. The gunmen also toppled the heads of two school teachers who were among a group of teachers and students they seized in April 2000.

A Roman Catholic priest, Father Roel Gallardo, who was kidnapped with the teachers was tortured and his nails plucked one by one before he was shot in the head.

"Ruthlessness is their trademark. They believe that chopping off one's head is the most degrading thing that can happen to an enemy," Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Jose Mabanta said.

"Definitely, the public is convinced and knows how gruesome, how ruthless and merciless these terrorists are," Mabanta said, but added that he felt the footage should not have been declassified. 

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