LIBERIA’S rebels agreed yesterday to lift the siege of the embattled capital Monrovia and pull back eight miles from the city centre, allowing the city’s port to be handed over to the West African peacekeeping force.

The agreement was reached at a meeting on the rebel-held side of the city between John Blaney, the US Ambassador, Brigadier Festus Okonkwo, the Nigerian force commander, and Abdulla Seyeah Sheriff, the main rebel commander. The rebels said that they would hand over the port by midday on Thursday.

“We are leaving. We will not leave anyone behind. We have no reason for holding on to the port,” Sekeu Fofana, a senior official with the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, said.

He said that the main rebel condition — that the former President, Charles Taylor, who left the country yesterday, should leave office and quit the political scene — had now been met.

Mr Fofana said that the rebels would pull back to the Po River, eight miles from Monrovia’s city centre, but said that there was also an undertaking that the remnants of Mr Taylor’s army, who are still manning road blocks on the government side, should also withdraw. “We have an undertaking from the Nigerians that that will happen,” he said.

Mr Taylor flew to exile in Nigeria on Monday after handing over power to his vice-president, Moses Blah.

Opening up the port of Monrovia is essential for the delivery of much-needed humanitarian supplies to hundreds of thousands of people who have been trapped by weeks of fighting which saw Monrovia effectively encircled by two rebel armies.

The US Ambassador hailed the agreement, which he said would allow the peacekeeping force led by Nigeria to cement a shaky ceasefire. “Freeing up the port is very important for humanitarian relief,” he told journalists after an hour-long meeting in a ramshackle building, formerly the offices of a shipping company, on the rebel held side of the city.

Mr Blaney arrived at the meeting in a heavily protected cavalcade and with a bodyguard of some 21 US soldiers, several of whom had been helicoptered in to the US Embassy from three American warships now anchored off Monrovia.

However, Mr Blaney declined to be drawn on what sort of military support the United States would provide to the peacekeeping force when it moves into the rest of Monrovia on Thursday.

“That has yet to be decided but the US is here in full support of the mission,” he said. Mr Blaney was accompanied to the meeting by General Thomas Turner, the overall commander of the American flotilla offshore which has on board a fighting force of some 2,200 Marines.

Elsewhere in Liberia, heavy fighting was again reported outside the second most important city of Buchanan, to the southeast of Monrovia, where a second rebel force was said to be advancing towards Monrovia’s airport.

Dozens of frightened people carrying their possessions on their heads were seen streaming towards the capital, already overflowing with hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

Liberia’s Government and a rebel faction called Model accused each other of starting the latest bloodshed as the rebels appeared to make a big advance. Officials said that they were still 50km (30 miles) from the capital’s international airport.

Mr Blah is due to fly to Ghana today to meet the rebel leader Sekou Konneh for talks on an all-inclusive interim administration after Mr Blah’s term of office comes to an end in early October.

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