East Timor's UN Transition Administration (UNTAET) praised Monday the weapons collection campaign conducted last week by the Indonesian Armed Forces and targeting militias in Jakarta's western half of Timor island.

A UN spokesman in Dili said UNTAET chief Sergio Vieira de Mello "welcomed the efforts" of the Indonesians, adding that he hoped they would continue.

An Indonesian police spokesman, Colonel Edward Pakasi, said Monday that security personnel had visited various refugee camps in West Timor, where they confiscated weaponry that included seven rifles and more than 200 homemade firearms.

No militiamen were detained during the operation, which also netted seven grenades, 1,200 rounds of ammunition and about 800 knives and other cutting weapons.

Many tens of thousands of East Timorese refugees remain in West Timor, nearly two years after their homeland, then occupied by Indonesia, voted for independence in a UN-sponsored plebiscite. Efforts to repatriate them back to East Timor have been consistently hampered by the East Timorese anti-independence militias now based in Indonesian West Timor.