Kathmandu  - Nepalese politicians have decided to remove thousands of former Maoist combatants from camps and attempt to reintegrate them into society after they were disqualified from the combatant rehabilitation process by the United Nations, official reports said Friday.

The decision came during a meeting Thursday of the Army Integration Special Committee, headed by Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, which members of the main opposition Nepali Congress party attended, the official Gorkhapatra newspaper said.

The committee decided to immediately release more than 4,000 former Maoist combatants and send them home.

The verification process by the United Nations Mission in Nepal, a key instrument in ending the country's Maoist insurgency, puts former Maoist combatants, who now live in camps, through a qualification process to later reintegrate them in the country's regular army.

It had disqualified nearly 10,000 Maoist combatants for either being a minor or joining the Maoist fighting force after a ceasefire in 2006, forcing them to leave the camps without work or a chance for army employment.

Among the 4,000 Maoist combatants who would leave the camps, almost half were minors, the newspaper said.

The government plans to seek help from international organizations for rehabilitation of the former combatants to make it easy for them to reintegrate into society, the newspaper said.

"The government will try to provide both financial and technical assistance, including vocational training and counseling, to the disqualified combatants soon," Nepali Congress member Ram Sharan Mahat told the newspaper.

The meeting also decided on the conditional integration of some 20,000 Maoist combatants who passed the two-phase UN verification process into security agencies.

According to the report, the combatants would be asked about their choice on what service they wanted to enter and would have to meet the set criteria for army or police service.

The Maoists, who lead the government, had previously maintained that all Maoist combatants who passed the verification should be integrated into the army.

However, other parties, including the Nepali Congress, opposed integration on such a large scale, saying the former combatants must go through a regular recruitment process.

The Maoists formally signed a peace deal with the government in November 2006, which placed Maoist combatants in 28 camps and their weapons locked up under UN supervision.

Nearly 14,000 people died in the decadelong communist insurgency. (dpa)