Typhoon hits northern Philippines and heads for Taiwan

By Karen Lema

MANILA (Reuters) - Typhoon Mitag swirled out to sea on Monday after killing 8 people, destroying homes and flooding rice paddies in the Philippines.

Mitag, a category 1 typhoon with winds of 120 km per hour (74 mph) at its centre, lost strength as it made landfall late on Sunday and did not directly hit the central Bicol region, where nearly 300,000 people had been evacuated.

A Philippine air force fighter plane went missing in stormy weather near the western island of Palawan, where tropical depression Hagibis was headed after it made a dramatic U-turn over the South China Sea.

"We don't know what really happened," Major-General Pedro Ike Inserto, air force vice commander, told Reuters. "We lost contact and we cannot say if it crashed or it landed elsewhere. We've sent a search team to locate the missing fighter."

Hagibis killed 14 people in the Philippines last week. It strengthened into a category 1 typhoon as it neared Vietnam before weakening.

Over the weekend, Mitag killed eight people in Bicol but the region, regularly hit by typhoons, was spared lethal landslides or mass flooding after Mitag veered north.

Two men were also reported missing, swept by the swollen river in Apayao province in the northern Philippines, disaster officials said.

In the northern province of Cagayan, Ronald Ayuyang, 39, said Mitag, a woman's name pronounced Me-tok from Yap in the Pacific Ocean, was not as strong as previous storms.