MANILA, Philippines—Human rights abuses are continuing in the Philippines with 21 extrajudicial killings taking place in the third quarter of the year, a local rights monitor said Thursday.

Of the killings 19 took place on the restive southern island of Mindanao where the government is fighting Muslim and communist secessionist groups, according to a report by Karapatan, an umbrella organization of human rights groups in the Philippines.

Karapatan said 43 people had been victims of "summary executions or arbitrary killings" in the first nine months of the year.

It said among the most recent killings was a labor activist, Maximo Baranda, who was gunned down in July by three unidentified armed men in Compostela Valley on Mindanao while in August another activist, Roel Doratot, was also shot dead in the same area.

Both men belonged to groups that have been highly critical of the military and the administration of President Gloria Arroyo, Karapatan said.

The rest of the deaths were civilians caught in the crossfire between the army and the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) -- including four children and a pregnant woman who were killed in a military aerial bombardment of a civilian community where retreating rebels were said to have fled.

"The Philippine military insisted that those killed in the airstrikes were rebels but local government officials said the victims were civilians," Karapatan noted.

It said the soldiers initially described the dead as MILF sympathizers but later retracted the statement and labelled them "collateral damage".

The government has suspended talks with the MILF and launched a massive assault after the rebels carried out coordinated attacks across several Mindanao provinces in August.

At the height of the fighting in late August, government said over 600,000 people were displaced from their homes. London-based rights group Amnesty International last month said that of that total, more than half remained in evacuation camps, where water and food are dwindling and sanitation is a major problem.

In 2007, the UN's special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings Philip Alston, as well as a Philippine fact finding mission, blamed the military for many of the killings, a claim that they hotly contested.

More than 930 people, including rights workers and political activists critical of government, have been killed since Arroyo assumed power in 2001, Karapatan said.