Former Liberian leader Charles Taylor alleged on Tuesday that unidentified enemies were planning to attack Nigerian peacekeepers in his country and put the blame on him.
Taylor left Liberia in August to take up an offer of political asylum in Nigeria, but said he feared a plot to turn the people of his host country against him and persuade them to compel him to leave.
”The strategy afoot is to orchestrate a scene whereby Nigerians and other soldiers serving in Liberia are brought in harm’s way with armed combatants believed to be my loyalists, so as to attribute it to Charles Taylor,” he said, in a statement faxed to AFP.
”It is their plan that at such a time, and God forbid, the people of Nigeria would then look at me with jaundiced eyes and consider me an enemy of the Nigerian people, thus exposing me to danger,” he said.
”They would consider me a terrible guest and react negatively toward me.
”This type of sinister orchestration now in the works is evident by constant statements associating me with disruption, unpeaceful and diabolical actions. All lies!” Taylor declared.
Many Nigerians are already opposed to Taylor’s exile in a luxury villa in the southeastern city of Calabar.
Nigeria’s journalists’ union and bar association have both called for the former warlord to be kicked out to face war crimes charges at a United Nations-backed special tribunal in Liberia’s neighbour Sierra Leone.
But President Olusegun Obasanjo, while warning Taylor not to interfere with developments in his homeland, has insisted the asylum deal was necessary to get him out of Liberia and restart a moribund peace process there.
Obasanjo left Abuja for Monrovia on Tuesday, where he is due to attend the inauguration of businessman Gyude Bryant as the head of an interim, peace-building administration and visit Nigeria’s 1 700-strong UN peacekeeping detachment in Liberia. — Sapa-AFP