Philippines vows to create elite force to deal with future incidents

He said he decided to create the force after seeing local police commandos take almost an hour to assault a tourist bus hijacked by a sacked policeman on Aug 23.

Eight Hong Kong residents and the gunman died in the botched rescue attempt.

“The training and maintenance of these elite forces is expensive. England, for all its wealth, has only 200 people in their SAS, who are trained to that level,” Aquino said in a live television interview. “We will copy to a degree the formation of that national unit.”

The special force would be an integrated military and police team, numbering between 200 and 400, to respond to any threat in any part of the country, he said.

Britain's Special Air Service has been called one of the world's toughest anti-terrorist units and has provided advice to other governments on handling hostage rescue situations.

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