Philippine President Benigno Aquino said Tuesday he could still secure a peace deal with Muslim rebels before standing down next year, after a botched anti-terror raid nearly derailed the process.

The Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Philippines' biggest Muslim rebel group, signed a peace pact last year aiming to end their four-decade separatist struggle that has claimed an estimated 120,000 lives.

China's efforts to stake its claim to most of the South China Sea should spark fear around the world, with military conflict possible, Philippine President Benigno Aquino told AFP on Tuesday.

In an exclusive interview, Aquino also warned that China's increasingly assertive actions raised the specter of other nations having access cut to vital international shipping lanes and rich fishing grounds in the sea.

A crewman on a Chinese vessel in Philippine waters has killed two of his colleagues with a knife, a coast guard official said Sunday.

One other crew member was wounded in the attack aboard the Liberian-flagged Quing May and has been taken to hospital.

Philippine soldiers clashed with about 200 fighters of a Al-Qaida-linked militant group on Thursday, leaving two soldiers and six guerrillas dead, a military spokeswoman said.

The soldiers were on patrol in the strife-torn island of Jolo when they encountered fighters of the Abu Sayyaf group, army spokeswoman Captain Rowena Muyuela said.

The United States and the Philippines will double the size of their annual war games this month, with some exercises to be staged close to a South China Sea flashpoint, the Filipino military said Monday.

The 10-day exercises between the long-time allies will be held as fears grow in the Philippines that China is seeking to take control of the strategically vital and resource-rich sea.

Typhoon Maysak was downgraded to a tropical depression and made landfall in the Philippines Sunday, forecasters said, easing fears after thousands of residents were evacuated from remote coastal communities to avoid potentially dangerous storm surge.

Maysak, which began as a Super Typhoon in the Pacific Ocean, reached the northeast coast of the main island of Luzon with winds of 55 kilometers (34 miles) an hour, chief state weather forecaster Esperanza Cayanan said.

Around 24,000 coastal residents of the Philippines were being evacuated as a precaution from approaching Tropical Storm Maysak on Saturday, officials said, even as experts downgraded the threat from what was at one point a super typhoon.

Maysak, which days earlier hit several small islands in the Pacific Ocean, has weakened into a 115-kilometer (71-mile) an hour storm, state weather forecaster Jun Galang told AFP.

Devotees in the fervently Catholic Philippines marked Good Friday by being nailed to crosses and whipping their backs bloody, in extreme acts of devotion that attracted thousands of spectators.

The annual ritual in scorching hot farmlands just outside of Manila is one of many colorful outpourings of faith in the Southeast Asian nation, where 80 percent of its 100 million people are Catholics.

The FBI confirmed Thursday that a senior Malaysian militant believed to have been involved in the 2002 Bali bombings was killed in a January raid in the Philippines that also left 44 police commandos dead.

Zulkifli Abdhir, who was on the bureau's most-wanted list with a $5-million reward on his head, was killed in the January 25 operation that plunged President Benigno Aquino's administration into crisis and jeopardized efforts to end a decades-long Muslim separatist insurgency, the FBI said.

Residents in storm wrecked areas of Micronesia appealed for help Thursday as a clean up began on the worst affected islands after Super Typhoon Maysak swept through the region on its way towards the Philippines.

"We can do with all the help we can get," Courtney Stinnett at the Truk Stop Hotel dive shop on the main island of Weno in Chuuk state told Agence France Presse.