President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed a decree late Tuesday granting the amnesty to members of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), as required under the August 15 peace accord between the government and the separatist guerrillas.

Teuku Darwin, head of the provincial justice ministry in Aceh, told AFP that 1,424 GAM prisoners across Indonesia were released, including 958 in Aceh.

At a state prison in Jantho near the provincial capital Banda Aceh, 58 rebels were released to waiting families, who hugged them fiercely amid tears.

Others had no families to greet them, such as 40-year-old Kardiman, who lost his relatives to last December's horrific tsunami that ravaged the coast of Aceh. He also had no home to return to.

"Now I'm alone. My house is gone and my two children and wife died in the tsunami," he told AFP, adding however that he was looking ahead to starting a small business.

District secretary Muhammad Dahlan presided over a ceremony marking the release at the prison.

"From today on, there is no more GAM. We are all only peace-loving Acehnese," Dahlan told the detainees.

The peace deal, spurred on due to the devastation wreaked by the tsunami, aims to end almost three decades of separatist conflict in resource-rich and staunchly Muslim Aceh which has claimed some 15,000 lives, mostly civilians.

Families at Banda Aceh airport waited anxiously for news of relatives.

A sobbing Yunidar Arabia told Metro TV that she was looking for her father, a wood trader who was taken away by Indonesia's paramilitary force in 2003 and presumed dead.

"I was just told this morning that he may return today," she said.

"I am glad, I am happy, but at the same time I am sad because mother is no longer there," she said, adding she lost her mother, grandfather and a younger sibling in the tsunami which killed 131,000 people in the province.