ZAMBOANGA (AFP) -- Police and troops have launched a massive manhunt for Islamic militants who seized an Italian priest in the troubled southern Philippines, officials said Monday.

Hours after Giancarlo Bossi, 57, was kidnapped from a coastal village in Zamboanga Sibugay province after saying Sunday mass, navy, police and army operatives had fanned out across the peninsula to search for him, they said.

The kidnappers led by renegade members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) took him to a waiting boat which sped toward Tungawan, a mostly Muslim coastal town where the militants hold sway, officials said.

"Our police and (military) forces have been tracking down the whereabouts of the victim and the abductors," said provincial police director Senior Superintendent Francisco Cristobal.

"The navy also conducted a blockade in the area," he said, adding that navy aircraft were also flying search patterns over the peninsula.

In Manila, armed forces spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Bartolome Bacarro said provincial officials held an emergency meeting in a bid to launch civilian negotiations to free the priest.

"There were initial reports that they were seen boarding two boats and moving toward Tungawan," he said.

Bossi had worked as a missionary for the Rome-based Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions in the area for the past decade. He has been in the Philippines since 1980, just shortly after he was ordained.

He is the third Italian priest seized in Zamboanga in the past 10 years by renegade members of the MILF, which has been fighting for an independent Islamic state in the southern Philippines since 1978.