Jakarta – In a gesture of reconciliation, East Timor's independence hero Xanana Gusmao welcomed home the families of former pro-Jakarta militiamen Friday as mass refugee returns resumed across the border with Indonesian West Timor.

Gusmao waited for the returnees at the end of the Metamasin bridge, near East Timor's southern border town of Salele, and hugged them as they arrived, Indonesia's Antara news agency reported. Seeing them off from the other side was the military commander for West Timor, Major General Willem da Costa.

Some 961 refugees attached to members of the pro-Jakarta Mahidi militia were registered to return home Friday, the head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in East Timor, Bernard Kerblatt, told AFP from East Timor's capital Dili.

By late afternoon 450 refugees had crossed the border and more were still streaming across the bridge, said UNHCR official Iain Hall. Kerblatt said the operation could continue till Saturday.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM), providing trucks to take the refugees to their home villages in Suai and Ainaro districts, said the return was the largest since March 2000. "Another 312 refugees crossed the border at Batugade on Wednesday, suggesting that a long awaited upturn in refugee returns from West Timor may be under way," an IOM statement said.

The Mahidi leader, Cancio Lopes de Carvalho, said before the repatriation that he had allowed his people to leave the squalid camps in West Timor and go home. "As a former chief of Mahidi, I have sincerely let them go," he told the Jakarta Post newspaper.

Lopes de Carvalho, the Mahidi leader, is among a group of former militia leaders who have been negotiating with Gusmao to bring home people allegedly under their control. Some have been asking for amnesties in return.