Malaysian security forces have attacked a group of armed Filipinos to end the group's three-week occupation of a Borneo village.
Prime Minister Najib Razak confirmed the assault was launched on Tuesday morning after clashes have killed eight policemen and he declared over the weekend that security forces were authorised to take any action deemed necessary.
The main group of intruders comprises nearly 200 members of a Philippine Muslim clan, some bearing rifles, who slipped past naval patrols last month, landed at a remote Malaysian coastal village in eastern Sabah state's Lahad Datu district and insisted the territory was theirs.
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Nineteen Filipino gunmen have also been slain since Friday in skirmishes that shocked Malaysians unaccustomed to such violence in their country, which borders insurgency-plagued southern provinces in the Philippines and Thailand.
The trespassers are surrounded by security forces as well as an undetermined number of other armed Filipinos suspected to have encroached on two other districts within 300km of Lahad Datu.
Army reinforcements from other states in Malaysia were being deployed to Sabah and would help police bolster public confidence by patrolling various parts of the state's eastern seaboard, Sabah police chief Hamza Taib said.
The Philippine government asked Malaysia on Monday to exercise maximum tolerance to avoid further bloodshed.
Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario headed to Kuala Lumpur for talks on the crisis with his Malaysian counterpart, spokesman Raul Hernandez said. The Philippines will also ask that Malaysia allow a Philippine navy ship with medical and social workers to travel to Lahad Datu to care for the wounded and take them and others back home, Hernandez said.
Some activists say the crisis illustrates an urgent need to review border security and immigration policies for Sabah, where hundreds of thousands of Filipinos have headed in recent decades - many of them illegally - to seek work and stability.
Groups of Filipino militants have occasionally crossed into Sabah to stage kidnappings, including one that involved island resort vacationers in 2000. Malaysia has repeatedly intensified its patrols, but the long and porous sea border with the Philippines remains difficult to guard.
Some in Muslim-majority Malaysia advocated patience in handling the Lahad Datu intruders who arrived on February 9. But the deaths of the Malaysian police officers, including six who were ambushed while inspecting a waterfront village in a separate Sabah district on Saturday, have triggered widespread alarm over the possibility of more such intrusions.
The Filipinos who landed in Lahad Datu, a short boat ride from the southern Philippines, have rebuffed calls for them to leave, claiming Sabah belonged to their royal sultanate for over a century and adding that Malaysia has been paying a paltry amount to lease the vast territory with many palm plantations for decades. The group is led by a brother of Sultan Jamalul Kiram III of the southern Philippine province of Sulu.
The Malaysian government has not commented on the claim that it has been paying rent to the Philippine sultanate for Sabah.
