A British businessman went missing in the Philippines last night, according to local media.

James David Rowe was last seen leaving a hotel in the southern city of Zamboanga GMANews, a local television channel, has reported.

A Foreign Office spokesman said: “We are investigating reports of a missing British national.”

One local newspaper reported that the city’s mayor has ordered the police to hunt for the Briton on the violence-hit island of Mindanao.

“Police is doing all it can to locate the foreigner, at this time, we still do not know what really happened. We can only speculate,” Sheila Covarrubias, a spokeswoman for Mayor Celso Lobregat told the Mindanao Examiner.

Mr Rowe is not believed to have returned to his hotel, a woman at the hotel’s front desk told the newspaper: “The foreigner left with a Filipino man and never returned. We reported the matter to the police. We don’t know what happened to him. His things are all inside the room.”

Fears that Westerners could be abducted by local extremist groups have been high in the area since a warning last month.

Abu Sayyaf militants, a Muslim separatists with links to al-Qaeda, operate in the south of the Philippines. The organisation has been linked with a series of bomb attacks and kidnappings in recent years.

Today one of the splintered separatist groups in the region claimed responsibility for an explosion that wounded five people, including a mother and her two children, when a homemade bomb was detonated in a van by mobile telephone.

On the southern island of Mindanao, rebels have been fighting for a separate Islamic state within the mainly-Catholic country. The decades-long conflict has claimed more than 120,000 lives. Sporadic violence has continued despite a 2003 ceasefire and peace talks.

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