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Charles Taylor arrested trying to flee to Cameroon

Former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor has been arrested, Nigerian police said yesterday.

Taylor, wanted by an international tribunal to stand trial for crimes against humanity, went missing on Monday night and was caught at Nigeria's southern border with Cameroon, national police spokesman Haz Iwendi said.

The former Liberian president, accused of fomenting two savage wars, seems set to become the first African leader to face trial for crimes against humanity.

Nigeria, which had granted asylum to the fast-talking, US-educated economist under a 2003 agreement that helped end Liberia's 14-year civil war, said on Tuesday that Taylor had disappeared a day earlier. The admission came three days after Nigeria -- under pressure from Washington and others -- reluctantly bowed to pressure to surrender Taylor to face justice.

The statement was released an hour before Obasanjo left Nigeria on a presidential jet headed for Washington, where he was scheduled to meet US President George W. Bush yesterday.

Nigeria had announced it would hand Taylor over to a UN-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.

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.

Although 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-Qaeda suicide bombers who attacked the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing more than 200 people.

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