Malaysia soldiers attack armed Filipino clan in Borneo

Where it gets really interesting is that the Sulu claim on Sabah may be invalid anyway. Sabah is supposed to have been ceded during the Brunei civil war in return for assistance but Brunei tarsilahs - the nearest to a written historical record - say that Sulu didn't actually do any fighting. At the time Sulu was a dependency of Brunei, not an independent state. After the civil war, claiming that Sabah had been ceded, the Sulu ruler declared himself a Sultan, declared Sulu independent and embarked upon a rather desultory war to take over Brunei. Not quite the cozy relationship often imagined.

There is, in fact, no evidence at all that Brunei ceded Sabah to Sulu.

At the time Baron Overbeck got involved Brunei and Sulu were still in dispute. Overbeck first did a deal with the Sultan of Brunei in which full sovereignty was assigned to Overbeck in return for $12,000 a year. Later he did a similar deal with the Sultan of Sulu for $5,000 a year. That actually defused the Brunei-Sulu conflict. It also shows that an annual payment is not necessarily rent, it can be in the nature of a pension.

Brunei and Sulu did well out of the deal since they had little governance of Sabah anyway and weren't making money out of it.

It is rather handy having a historian commenting on this isssue...thanks, Bob!

Yes. Thanks.

The "Sultan of Sulu" just croaked. Multiple organ failure.

http://globalnation.inquirer.net/88357/heir-of-sulu-sultanate-dies