DISASTER agencies yesterday delivered body bags, food, water, and medicine to crowded evacuation centres in the southern Philippines as officials ordered the digging of graves to prevent disease after hundreds died in flash floods.

With funeral companies overwhelmed, a flood-hit Philippine city has organised the first mass burial of some of nearly 700 people killed in one of worst calamities to strike the region in decades.

RESCUERS searched for more than 800 people missing in the southern Philippines yesterday after flash floods and landslides swept houses into rivers and out to sea, killing more than 650 in areas ill-prepared to cope with storms.

The death toll from storm-triggered flash floods that devastated a wide swathe of the southern Philippines has risen to 521, the Philippine Red Cross said today.

Pounding rain from a tropical storm swelled rivers and sent walls of water crashing into two southern Philippine cities in the thick of night, killing at least 436 people, many caught in their beds, officials said today.

The death toll from storm-triggered flash floods in the southern Philippines has risen to more than 120, with over 100 people missing.

Police safely defused a powerful bomb that may have been intended to be set off in a Roman Catholic cathedral in a southern Philippine city where suspected Muslim militants killed two people in bombings last week.

Several hundred Muslims in the Philippines have burned US and British flags in protest at the bombing of Afghanistan.