COTABATO - Terror mastermind Noordin Mohammed Top's death is a big setback for connected militants in the southern Philippines, the country's major Moro rebel group and an analyst said Friday.

Malaysian Noordin, killed on Thursday during a police raid in Indonesia, is widely believed to have helped other members of the radical Southeast Asian Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) network in the southern Philippines.

Only about 30 to 40 JI militants remain on the Philippines's Mindanao island, according to the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, but the network is blamed for the country's worst terrorist attack and recent violence.

"Noordin's announced death is a blow to the JI militants in Mindanao," Moro Islamic Liberation Front spokesman Eid Kabalu told Agence France-Presse.

"They will likely stop bombing operations for the meantime."

The MILF has been fighting for a separate homeland in the southern Philippines since 1978 and is accused of having links to JI, although Kabalu repeated the group's denials that it has had anything to do with Noordin.

Noordin is widely believed to be a close associate and inspiration of Umar Patek and Dulmatin, Indonesian militants wanted for the 2002 night club bombings in Bali that killed 202, mostly foreign tourists.

Patek and Dulmatin entered Mindanao's porous southern border sometime in 2003, according to Philippine military intelligence sources.

A year later they allegedly helped Filipino Abu Sayyaf militants firebomb a passenger ferry that killed more than 100 in Manila Bay in the country's worst terrorist attack.

About the same time, the MILF agreed to a ceasefire with Manila and officially cut all links with foreign militants to negotiate a political settlement for their separatist insurgency.

The executive director of the Philippine Institute of Political Violence and Terrorism Research, Rommel Banlaoi, also said Noordin's death was a "significant blow to the JIs" in Mindanao.

"Noordin was a source of inspiration to these JI militants here, who all belong to a more radical cell affiliated with him," Banlaoi told AFP.

"His death will create low morale on the part of the JIs here," he said.