However, Hamsiraji Sali, alias Commander Jose Ramirez, warned that he might change his mind if the military does not relent in its massive manhunt for the Abu Sayyaf, which led to the death of one of his men last week.
Sali, who has a $1-million prize on his head offered by the US, called up a ABS-CBN television station in Mindanao yesterday and said he wanted to give himself up after his faction had broken ties with the group of Khaddafi Janjalani because of contradicting views and goals.
"Maybe if we all pitch in to help the government, the entire country will rejoice because Basilan (an Abu Sayyaf stronghold) has been grabbing the headlines," he told the television station. "What we want is for the people of Basilan not to be angry at us."
However, if the military continued to launch operations against them, Sali said, he might change his mind and retaliate.
"If the operations continue, we can be worse than (Abu) Sabaya. You know Sabaya only uses his mouth," he warned, referring to the brutal Abu Sayyaf spokesman the military said was killed in a sea gunbattle with troops in June.
The swaggering Sabaya loved the spotlight and often taunted his pursuers, regularly calling up the media to air his threats.
ABS-CBN said it interviewed Sali by phone from an unknown hideout in Mindanao. The military says he is believed to be hiding in Basilan.
Reacting to Sali’s surrender offer, a local military commander whose troops have been hunting down the Abu Sayyaf said it could be a ploy to ease the pressure on the bandits.
"They can’t plan what they want to do because we are running after them. They want to surrender each time we have them cornered. They’re just playing games with us," Col. Bonifacio Ramos, commander of the Army’s 103rd Brigade, said.
A captured Abu Sayyaf member, Kair Muktar, recently told reporters that the group’s leaders were locked in a power struggle following Sabaya’s death and quarreling over ransom money.
Ramos said Sali should surrender unconditionally "if he really wants to surrender, not through his mouth."
The military believes it had boxed up the Abu Sayyaf because one of the bandits was killed in a nearby town last week while visiting a relative, Ramos said.
That could indicate that the group has been reduced to foraging at night and could not move during the day.
Last month, Sali told a radio station that he wanted to surrender and cooperate with the government to help the civilian population of Basilan, where he is based.
The military earlier said Sali’s group was responsible for the abduction of 35 villagers in the Basilan town of Lamitan in August last year.
Ten of the villagers were beheaded to fend off a military pursuit while the remaining hostages either escaped or were rescued by soldiers.
Last month, former American hostage Jeffrey Schilling positively identified Sali as one of his captors at the trial of Abu Sayyaf member Hector Janjalani, younger brother of Khaddafi Janjalani.
Schilling was held hostage for nearly eight months until he was rescued by troops in April 2001.
In May, Washington offered up to $5 million for the capture of one or all of five top Abu Sayyaf leaders — Sali, Janjalani, Sabaya, Abu Sulaiman and Isnilon Hapilon. They were later indicted in absentia by a US grand jury.
The five were wanted for the kidnapping last year of Americans Martin and Gracia Burnham and Guillermo Sobero.
Sobero was beheaded by the bandits as an "Independence Day gift" to President Arroyo in June last year. Martin Burnham was killed last June 7 during a rescue attempt in which Gracia Burnham was wounded but freed.
On June 21, Sabaya was reported killed in a clash with Philippine forces off the coast of Sibuco town in Zamboanga del Norte. But his body fell into the shark-infested waters and was never found, the military said.
The Abu Sayyaf claims to be fighting for an independent Islamic state in Mindanao but the group is mostly into kidnapping foreigners, including Americans, and Filipino Christians.
It operates in Basilan, Zamboanga del Norte and Sulu provinces.
An Abu Sayyaf faction in Sulu, led by Radulan Sahiron, is currently holding hostage four Filipino women and three Indonesian sailors and had demanded P16 million in ransom.
The bandits intercepted a Singapore-registered tugboat towing a barge delivering coal from Indonesia to Cebu in the waters off Sulu in June and seized four Indonesian crewmen. One crewman, however, managed to escape.
In August, the Abu Sayyaf took six Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian evangelists – four women and two men – captive. Their Muslim guide was freed and the men were beheaded.
The military launched an operation to rescue the hostages but has, so far, failed to pinpoint their location.
Considered a terrorist group by Washington, the Abu Sayyaf has been linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden and to the Indonesia-based militant group Jemaah Islamiyah, al-Qaeda’s main arm in Southeast Asia.
It was blamed for a string of bombings in Zamboanga City last month that killed 11 people – including an American soldier and a Filipino marine – and wounded over 160 others.
Authorities believe the Abu Sayyaf was trained on how to make bombs by Jemaah Islamiyah.
Zamboanga was targeted because it served as a hub of a joint US-Philippine military campaign earlier this year against the Abu Sayyaf.
Last week, a suspected Abu Sayyaf leader in charge of launching terrorist bomb attacks was arrested in Pasay City. Police said Adbulmujak Edris was involved in the Zamboanga bombings.
Police filed criminal charges two weeks ago against five identified Abu Sayyaf members and several unidentified "John Does" in a bombing that killed an American soldier and three Filipinos a month ago in Zamboanga.
Late last month, five Abu Sayyaf members were indicted for two other Zamboanga bombings – the Oct. 17 twin bombings on two adjacent department stores and an attack near a Roman Catholic Shrine three days later.
The suspects were caught with bomb-making materials as well as a diagram on how to build a car bomb. At least eight people, including a Philippine Marine, were killed and 176 others were wounded in the attacks.
Director General Hermogenes Ebdane Jr., chief of the Philippine National Police, said his force and the military are doing their best to thwart possible terrorist attacks.
The United States warned that al-Qaeda operatives and their allies plan to launch deadly bomb attacks in the Philippines within the coming weeks until the New Year celebration, similar to the attack in Bali, Indonesia, in which nearly 200 mostly tourists were killed. — With Christina Mendez