A total of 2,150 police left on a warship from Krueng Guekeuh port in North Aceh, where they had waited since Saturday for a ship to arrive to take them home.

Under the agreement signed last August between the government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), all non-local troops and police were supposed to leave tsunami-ravaged Aceh province by December 31.

The last contingent of troops departed on December 29 and the implementation of the peace accord, inked in Helsinki and aimed at ending nearly three decades of conflict, has gone as scheduled apart from the late departure of the police.

Pieter Feith, head of the Aceh Monitoring Mission, praised both sides for completing the crucial phase of the peace pact.

The mission groups about 240 observers from the European Union and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

"I want to congratulate both parties for showing strong political will and real leadership by sticking to their commitments as agreed in the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding," Feith said in a statement.

"The full completion of the decommissioning and relocation phase is of major importance and I daresay that the peace process has now become irreversible."

The accord was signed in the wake of the December 2004 tsunami, which killed an estimated 168,000 Acehnese and forced both sides to take stock of their priorities.

Under the deal, GAM dropped its call for independence in exchange for a form of local government, while the government agreed to grant ex-fighters amnesties and allow local political parties.

The peace agreement stipulates that only 14,700 soldiers and 9,100 police, all locally recruited, are to remain in Aceh. GAM has handed in its weapons for destruction in return for the pullout.

The separatist conflict had claimed about 15,000 lives, most of them civilians, since GAM began its struggle for an independent state in 1976.

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