President Fidel Ramos has declared war against the shadowy brigade, which claimed responsibility for more than 100 assassinations of allegedly corrupt policemen, soldiers and civilians since 1985, and then abruptly went quiet three years ago.

The President has set up a Taskforce on Crime headed by Interior and Local Government Secretary Rafael Alunan, Justice Secretary Teofisto Guingona and Defence Secretary Renato de Villa to hunt down the urban terrorist group plus several criminal gangs which have launched robbery campaigns during the Christmas season.

A force of 500 policemen - including veterans from the United Nations peace-keeping force in Haiti - have been deployed to track the brigade, whose counter-intelligence has so far managed to elude dozens of probes by the National Security Intelligence Agency and the National Bureau of Investigation.

Sources close to the brigade said yesterday that the 'liquidation cell', which is claiming responsibility for the killings, is a breakaway group from the mainstream brigade, which in turn split from the Communist Party of the Philippines and the National Democratic Front in the early 1990s.

They said the ambushers were a 'group of young hotheads' who mixed Marxist-Leninist ideology with criminal activities such as extortion, bank robberies and kidnaps-for-ransom to raise operating funds.

Front leaders Jose Maria Sison and Luis Jalandoni, who live in exile in the Netherlands, said yesterday the urban liquidation squad was a very small group of 'misguided revolutionaries who were no longer part of the revolutionary movement'.

'They have abandoned their revolutionary principles and have allowed themselves to be used by politicians and businessmen for money,' they said.

Sources said many of the volunteers for this rogue unit came from criminal gangs, compared with the mainstream of the brigade, who are mostly young idealists from the university compounds, labour unions and Philippine activist movements.

They said the brigade was formed in the mid-1980s to 'assassinate enemies of the people', and was named after a Filipino-Chinese labour leader killed under the Marcos regime in 1983.

The assassination unit calls itself the Sparrow Brigade after the national animal emblem.

One of its most famous victims was former North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war Colonel James Rowe, a Manila-based military counter-insurgency expert who was gunned down near the gates of the US Embassy in 1989.

The sources said the brigade had close links with the Maoist-Leninist Shining Path guerilla movement of Peru, which operates in a parallel environment whereby a former Spanish colony has hobbled on to become an economic battleground between the rich and poor.

In the early days, the Communist Party had close contact with China, and both the brigade and the Shining Path adhere to the Maoist guerilla principles of encircling cities from the countryside.

Meanwhile, the Government yesterday dismissed claims by the outspoken Archbishop of Manila, Cardinal Jaime Sin, that the country was becoming Asia's 'murder centre'.

Cardinal Sin's statements were 'too much of an exaggeration', a top aide to President Ramos, executive secretary Ruben Torres, said.

'I think the records show our crime rate here is going down.'