Warlord Charles Taylor Arrested in Nigeria

03/29/2006

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) - Former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, who vanished in Nigeria after authorities reluctantly agreed to transfer him to a war crimes tribunal, has been arrested trying to cross the border into Cameroon, Nigerian police said Wednesday.

Taylor, who went missing Monday night, was captured by security forces in the far northeastern border town of Gamboru, in Borno State, nearly 600 miles from the villa in southern Calabar where Taylor had lived in exile, Information Minister Frank Nweke said in a statement.

President Olusegun Obasanjo, on a visit to the United States, ordered Taylor’s “immediate repatriation” to Liberia, the statement said.

Taylor disappeared just days after Nigeria, which had granted asylum to the fast-talking, U.S.-educated economist under a 2003 agreement that helped end Liberia’s 14-year civil war, reluctantly bowed to pressure to surrender Taylor to face justice.

The admission that Taylor had slipped away came an hour before Obasanjo left Nigeria on a presidential jet headed for Washington, where he was scheduled to meet with President Bush on Wednesday.

Nigeria had announced it would hand Taylor over to a U.N.-backed Sierra Leone tribunal to be tried for alleged war crimes related to Sierra Leone’s 1991-2001 civil war, but the government had made no moves to arrest him before he disappeared.

Taylor, a one-time warlord and rebel leader, is charged with backing Sierra Leone rebels, including child fighters, who terrorized victims by chopping off body parts. He would be the first African leader to face trial for crimes against humanity.

While the Sierra Leone tribunal’s charges refer only to the war there, Taylor also has been accused of starting civil war in Liberia and of harboring al-Qaida suicide bombers who attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 200 people.

Obasanjo initially resisted calls to surrender Taylor. But Saturday, after Liberia’s new President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf asked that Taylor be handed over for trial, Obasanjo agreed.

The U.N. Security Council had expressed surprise and concern at Taylor’s disappearance and Secretary-General Kofi Annan had said he planned to talk to the Nigerian authorities about it. He urged all countries to refuse to give Taylor refuge.

The U.N. tribunal’s prosecutor, Desmond de Silva, warned that Taylor was “a threat to the peace and security of West Africa.”

Many of Taylor’s loyalist soldiers are believed to be roaming freely in Liberia, Sierra Leone and civil-war divided Ivory Coast, from where Taylor launched his rebel incursion into Liberia on Dec. 24, 1989.