President on UN’s wanted list

LIBERIAN President Charles Ghankay Taylor — known as “Pappy” to his band of child soldiers — is a wanted man in West Africa.

Taylor, who has been accused by human rights groups of masterminding conflicts across the region, was indicted last month by a UN-backed war crimes court in neighbouring Sierra Leone on charges he armed and trained rebels in exchange for diamonds during the country's 10 years of civil war in which an estimated 50,000 people died.

According to Amnesty International, Sierra Leone's civil war "was characterised by some of the worst abuses known: widespread deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, torture, including rape and deliberate amputation of limbs, and abduction and forced recruitment of large numbers of people, including children."