y after dawn and the sound of automatic weapons could be heard from several parts of the city, Portugal‘s Lusa news agency said. Forces backing rebel commander Brigadier Ansumane Mane issued a call over their radio station to Bissau‘s population to abandon the capital, a sign the conflict was about to erupt again in earnest. Lusa said the rebels, who control most of the country beyond the city centre, had not immediately replied to the loyalist fire with artillery fire of their own. There was no immediate word on the reason for the bombardment, which followed sporadic exchanges of small arms fire over the weekend. The renewed shelling came as a French navy vessel was due to arrive in Bissau carrying the first contingent of a regional peacekeeping force. The force of 291 African soldiers left Dakar, the capital of neighbouring Senegal, on Sunday. The force‘s deployment was a condition of a truce signed in November between President Joao "Nino" Vieira and rebel commander Brigadier Ansumane Mane in the Nigerian capital Abuja. The peace deal also called for the setting up of a transitional government to oversee elections in the impoverished Atlantic seaboard state. The peace process was deadlocked for several weeks after the rebels insisted that some 3,000 Senegalese and Guinean troops, sent to aid Vieira when the revolt first broke out last May, be withdrawn before the government was installed. But a compromise was eventually worked out last Friday under which the Senegalese and Guinean troops would pull out once the African peacekeepers were in place. The transitional government would take office soon after. The revolt erupted in May after Vieira fired Mane, his former ally in the independence war against Portugal, for alleged arms smuggling.