RABAT, 19 August 2005 — Morocco welcomed home yesterday the last 404 prisoners of war, freed after being held by Western Sahara’s exiled Polisario Front independence movement, many of them for almost two decades.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said the release in Tindouf, Algeria, followed US mediation. The men were being flown to Morocco to be reunited with their families.

The release could ease tensions between Morocco and Algeria in a region where the West wants stability because of fears it could be a possible source of Islamic militancy.

“The Polisario Front today released all the Moroccan prisoners in its custody,” an ICRC statement said.

There was no official reaction from Morocco, but a government source in Rabat said the prisoners landed in the city of Agadir, about 600 km south of the Moroccan capital, at 5:30 p.m. (1730 GMT).

In previous handovers, freed prisoners went to an Agadir military base for medical checks before meeting their families.

The ICRC has previously repatriated more than 2,000 Moroccan prisoners captured by Polisario in a 16-year guerrilla war. A UN-brokered cease-fire was clinched in 1991, ending the armed conflict over Western Sahara, though the dispute rumbles on.

Polisario said the gesture was intended to create an atmosphere helpful to efforts by a newly appointed UN envoy to solve the nearly 30-year-old tussle over the desert territory, mostly held by Morocco but claimed by the Algeria-backed Front.

“This will contribute, we hope, to generating a climate which will favor a dynamic for peace, which we would like to believe will be irreversible,” Mohamed Sidati, Polisario’s minister delegate for Europe, said in a statement. Morocco has refused to allow a vote on self-determination promised in the UN-brokered cease-fire.

A Moroccan government source said US intervention with Algeria had secured the release, which he said was long overdue.

The source, who asked not to be named, said all the POWs should have been handed over immediately after the 1991 truce. “But they (Algeria and Polisario) held them for years and years, releasing them in trickles,” he added.

The Western Sahara dispute has hampered three decades of efforts to improve strained ties between Algeria and Morocco.

In New York, John Bolton, the new US ambassador to the United Nations, thanked Algeria and Morocco for their part in the release, which was the last of 15 such handovers.

“Some of the prisoners have been held for 20 years, and their continued imprisonment has been a long-standing obstacle to improving the bilateral relationship between Algeria and Morocco and resolving the dispute over Western Sahara,” he said.

US Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was in Algeria to oversee the release on behalf of President George W. Bush.

Lugar met Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and was due to meet Moroccan leaders in Rabat today, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said. Lugar’s talks in both capitals will cover anti-terrorism cooperation with the United States as well as the prisoner release, she added.

Spain, the former colonial power, welcomed the release.

“The Spanish government trusts that this decision will contribute to the creation of an atmosphere of confidence between the parties that fosters a new dynamic in the process of resolving the Western Sahara conflict within the framework of the United Nations,” a Foreign Ministry statement said.

The conflict began when Morocco seized the northwest African territory of about 260,000 people after Spain withdrew in 1975.