Britain's Defence Secretary, Mr Geoff Hoon, said yesterday there was no question of British forces taking over the UN peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone or being sucked into civil war.
Mr Hoon told parliament that British troops were sent to the west African country to allow for the safe evacuation of British nationals and to secure the international airport to help a build-up of additional UN peacekeepers.
"Our aim is that once the UN mission has been reinforced by these troops, our role at the airport would no longer be required." Mr Hoon said the situation in Sierra Leone remained volatile but that the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) appeared to be "on the back foot".
Opposition MPs had called on Mr Hoon to clarify the role of British troops after reports they had deployed all over the capital and were carrying out tasks well beyond their narrow brief.
The UN said yesterday that rebels in Sierra Leone had freed 139 of its peacekeepers and called for a cessation of hostilities, with all sides returning to their pre-crisis positions. A further 347 UN peacekeepers remain in the hands of the RUF rebels, who seized them at the start of May in a dispute over disarmament.
The UN said that the 139 hostages had been sent to neighbouring Liberia - 15 of them to the capital Monrovia and the remainder to the border town of Foya. "This is obviously a very positive development. It shows that the crisis around our detained personnel is moving into a new phase," the UN spokesman, Mr David Wimhurst, said in Freetown.
The RUF leader, Mr Foday Sankoh, a key player in the crisis and whose men are holding the country's lifeblood diamond mines, has not been seen since a shoot-out with rival forces at his Freetown residence on May 8th.