Former Liberian leader and war-crimes suspect Charles Taylor has disappeared from the villa in which he was living in exile in Nigeria, the Nigerian Presidency said in a statement on Tuesday.
The statement said Taylor had left his house in Calabar some time on Monday night and President Olusegun Obasanjo, who on Saturday had said that Taylor would be handed back to Liberia, had set up a panel to investigate.
Obasanjo’s spokesperson, Remi Oyo, added: ”All the security people who were in charge of looking after Mr Taylor have been arrested.”
A five-member panel, including a retired police chief and a representative of the United Nations Development Programme, would investigate who was responsible for the disappearance and ”ascertain whether he escaped or was abducted”.
International prosecutors and human-rights advocates had warned that if Taylor was able to escape extradition to a UN-backed war-crimes court in Sierra Leone, he might once again endanger the stability of west Africa.
The escape will also be an embarrassment to Obasanjo on the eve of a visit to Washington to meet President George Bush of the United States, whose spokesperson this week urged Nigeria to ensure that Taylor would face justice for alleged atrocities.
Journalists who visited Taylor in his villa in the south-eastern city of Calabar last week saw no evidence of any Nigerian security on the approach road to the house and were waved through the compound gates without questioning.
Taylor is accused of masterminding a policy of murder, torture, pillage and rape in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where prosecutors have lodged a 17-count indictment alleging crimes against humanity.
In August 2003, in a bid to bring an end to a brutal civil war, Obasanjo invited him to step down as president, leave his besieged capital Monrovia and accept political asylum in Nigeria.
On Monday, the US had called on Nigeria’s government to deliver Taylor to a UN tribunal in Sierra Leone for trial on charges of crimes against humanity.
With prospects again clouded for Taylor’s prosecution for the atrocities in Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone in the 1990s, state department spokesperson Sean McCormack said, ”He needs to be brought to justice.
”It is incumbent upon the Nigerian government now to see that he is conveyed to the international court,” McCormack said. ”Obviously, we have talked to President [Olusegun] Obasanjo about this.”
Obasanjo raised the hopes of international prosecutors that Taylor might soon be brought to court, when his government said on Saturday that Liberia was free to take the suspect ”into custody”.
But Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf said Taylor should go to Sierra Leone rather than coming to Liberia where he was not indicted by any court.
”This is right now mainly an issue for the court, for the Liberians as well as the Nigerians to work out in terms of the modalities and all the logistics of moving him from one place to another,” McCormack said.
But he added, ”We have made clear both in public and private to the Nigerians that it is their responsibility to see that he [Taylor] is able to be conveyed and face justice.” — AFP
