General Mohamad Sharom Nordin, Malaysian army chief, said 22 Filipinos currently under police custody in the eastern Sabah state were neither militants nor gun runners.

"Actually they were on their way to a wedding feast and it is the custom in their village to fire shots and so they brought the ammunition," he was quoted as saying by the official Bernama news agency.

Last Thursday military officials seized a large number of weapons including explosive material and 216 bullets.

Mohamad said the arms cache did not originate from Malaysia but from the Philippines.

Sabah is located a short boat ride from the Philippine province of Mindanao where government forces are battling Muslim separatists.

There was initial fear that the intruders could be members of regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) or Muslim separatist rebels from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which is active in southern Philippines.

Mohamad said the Filipinos had strayed into Malaysian waters since the island they were heading to was nearby.

But bringing explosives and ammunition into Malaysia "for whatever reasons" was an offence, he said.

Under the Malaysian firearms laws, courts can impose a death sentence for unauthorised possession of weaponry, explosives and even bullets.

JI, which has been linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, aims to destabilise the region and bring Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the southern Philippines under a fundamentalist umbrella.

The 12,500-strong MILF has been waging a 25-year insurgency to establish an independent Islamic state in the southern Philippines.

The MILF signed a ceasefire agreement with the government here in 2001, but the pact was shattered in February when the Philippine military attacked a key MILF enclave to flush out alleged kidnappers, terrorists and other suspected criminals sheltered by the rebel group.

SPACE.WIRE