"The deadline for the demands has passed," said Colonel Gerard Dubois, the spokesman for the French-led European Union security force that issued the ultimatum at the weekend.

Final details and the geographic limits of Operation Bunia Town Without Arms were laid out at meetings with Thomas Lubanga, the leader of the rebel group dominant in Bunia, where inter-ethnic clashes claimed hundreds of lives last month.

Clearing up these technicalities led the ultimatum to be extended by a day Tuesday, although by that point very few of the gunmen who recently roamed the town in large numbers were visible anyway.

"Lubanga made no demands" for the force to provide additional guarantees for his security, said the spokesman.

The area around Bunia is rife with rival armed groups.

"We have the means and the men to secure Bunia," said Dubois.

According to a map Dubois showed journalists, the ban covers a very rough circle of approximately 10 square kilometres (four square miles), which includes the town's airport.

Lubanga was permitted to keep an armed escort of some 30 men at his Bunia headquarters, but even this security contingent is not allowed to display weapons while on the streets of the town.

In keeping with the force's avowed refusal to "cooperate or collaborate" with any of the region's armed groups, Dubois insisted there had been no negotiations with Lubanga and added that the rebel leader signed no document of compliance.

"There was no deal. We gave him obligations in writing signed by General (Jean-Paul) Thonier," the commander of the EU force, said the spokesman.

Dubois said that an undisclosed number of additional armed men attached to Lubanga's Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) would be escorted by a separate UN mission out of Bunia later Wednesday afternoon.

The spokesman has repeatedly said that any visible weapons found after the deadline would be confiscated, but never specified exactly how this would done.

On Tuesday, a patrol from the EU force parted a group of UPC gunmen from their weapons by first firing a warning shot, pushing the men to the ground and taking away their arms, according to witnesses.

But since the deadline had not yet expired, the weapons were returned once it became clear the gunmen were not attacking the town.

Lubanga has also been told to tell the force exactly where he has encamped his men outside the perimeter.

Some 700 French troops in the EU force and an equal number of Paraguayan military guards working under a separate UN mission are exempt from the ban.

WAR.WIRE