Nigeria captured former Liberian leader and warlord Charles Taylor on Wednesday and deported him towards Monrovia, where United Nations peacekeepers were waiting to arrest him on charges of crimes against humanity.
West Africa’s most notorious fugitive was flown out of the northern city of Maiduguri on board a Nigerian presidential jet after customs agents caught him attempting to escape across the border into Cameroon, witnesses said.
A senior police officer said the flight would take Taylor home to Liberia, where UN officials have a Security Council mandate to detain him and extradite him to a war crimes court in neighbouring Sierra Leone.
Nigerian Information Minister Frank Nweke told reporters that President Olusegun Obasanjo, who is on a visit to Washington, had “ordered the immediate repatriation of Charles Taylor to Liberia”.
A witness told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that former president Taylor was arrested when he tried to pass across the Gamboringala border post from Nigeria into Cameroon in a Range Rover jeep carrying diplomatic plates and a large sum of United States dollars.
News of Taylor’s arrest came only hours before Obasanjo — facing sharp international criticism for allowing the exiled Liberian leader to disappear from his home in exile — was expected to meet US President George Bush.
Liberia, or the country’s UN peacekeeping force, is now expected to expel him in turn to neighbouring Sierra Leone, where international prosecutors want to try him on 17 charges, including crimes against humanity.
Taylor — a Libyan-trained former guerrilla chieftain — is considered the single most powerful figure behind a series of civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone between 1989 and 2003, which left around 400 000 people dead.
Prosecutors at Sierra Leone’s UN-backed Special Court allege he sponsored the brutal rebels of the Revolutionary United Front as they slaughtered, maimed, raped and enslaved tens of thousands of civilians during the 1990s.
The Special Court has drawn up a 17-count charge sheet alleging crimes against humanity, murder, sexual violence and unlawful use of child soldiers.
The call for extradition is supported by the US, the UN and various international human rights organisations.
As a rebel army was closing in on Taylor’s capital Monrovia in August 2003, west African leaders saw an opportunity to bring Liberia’s latest 14-year-old bout of bloodshed to an end by persuading him to flee to Nigeria.
Until Monday’s disappearance, Taylor had lived in exile in a plush riverside villa in the south-eastern city of Calabar, where he was ostensibly under close surveillance by Nigerian police and security agents.
He was often accused of meddling in the affairs of his homeland, and Obasanjo was under mounting international pressure to detain him.
On Saturday, Obasanjo finally agreed in principle to allow the Liberia “to take custody of Taylor”, but gave no indication of how it might do so.
On Tuesday, embarrassed Nigerian officials said he had “disappeared” and that 22 police officers who were supposed to have been keeping watch on him had been arrested on charges of “dereliction of duty”.
The warlord’s apparent escape provoked international outrage and Obasanjo arrived in the US to find his government had been sternly rebuked by the White House, which demanded Taylor’s capture and extradition.
Then, on Wednesday, came news of the arrest.
“He was arrested in the early hours of today [Wednesday]. He is currently with the security agents. He will be flown to Abuja later,” Nigeria’s national police spokesperson Haz Iwendi, told AFP.
Babagana Alhaji Kata, a trader working near the Gamgoringala border post, said that Taylor had arrived at the frontier in an ash-coloured Range Rover jeep with the diplomatic corps number plate 81 CD 85.
“He was wearing a white flowing robe,” Kata said.
“He passed through immigration but when he reached customs they were suspicious and they insisted on searching the jeep, where they found a large amount of US dollars,” he added.
“After a further search they discovered he was Charles Taylor,” he said.
Kata said that there were only two men with Taylor, his driver and an aide, but that both escaped into the bush. Taylor was driven off under armed guard towards the regional capital, Maiduguri. — AFP