Cotabato City, Philippines - An unmanned US spy plane crashed and exploded in a southern Philippine town where government troops were hunting down rogue Muslim rebels, a Catholic priest who witnessed the incident said Thursday.

The plane was flying low and smashed into a telecommunications tower Saturday in Pikit town in North Cotabato province, 960 kilometres south of Manila, Father Eduardo Vazquez said.

"It crashed into the tower at the town proper, and it exploded like a grenade," he said. "The police and the military do not want to talk about it, but many people saw the spy plane."

Vazquez said police immediately recovered the wreckage and turned it over to the military.

An undetermined number of American troops have been stationed in several areas on the southern island of Mindanao, where North Cotabato is located, for the past six years, purportedly to train Philippine troops in counterterrorism.

Major Randolph Canbangbang, a regional military spokesman, confirmed the crash but stressed the American aircraft was not a spy plane but an unmanned survey aircraft.

Canbangbang, however, could not explain why the plane was conducting a survey late at night.

The area where the spy plane crashed was close to a marshland where rogue Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) commander Ameril Umbra Kato was suspected to be hiding.

Kato and two other MILF commanders attacked towns and seized villages in August after the Supreme Court stopped the signing of an MILF-government agreement that would have expanded the autonomous Muslim region on Mindanao.

Government forces have intensified operations to hunt down the rogue MILF commanders and their followers and have vowed to bring them to justice. (dpa)