Liberia ceasefire shatters as rebels take bridge

Liberian rebels shattered a day-old pledge to cease-fire, lobbing mortars at neighbourhoods crowded with refugees and briefly capturing a key bridge in the war-ruined capital desperately short of food and water.

Boosting security around the US Embassy, American military helicopters swept into embattled Monrovia yesterday with 20 new troops, completing deployment of a 41-member team.

As a fog bank engulfed the rain-soaked city, the helicopters swept out again with 18 American and European evacuees – aid workers, journalists and members of a US assessment team sent to evaluate conditions for any possible US deployment.

With no let-up in fighting, West African leaders pledged to send two Nigerian battalions to Liberia within days, the vanguard of what they say should be a 3,250-strong international force to bring peace to the devastated nation.

The first Nigerian battalion, 770-strong, would arrive in a week, officials said.

The US has yet to say whether it will take part in any military intervention in Liberia, as West African and UN leaders and many Liberians have urged.

US Navy Lieutenant Commander Terrence Dudley, spokesman for the US assessment team, declined to discuss its conclusions, saying only it was “satisfied” with the information gathered so far. Four team members are remaining in Liberia to provide additional information as needed.

In Washington, a senior official said late yesterday that a meeting – with US State Department and military officials – would be convened today in Sierra Leone to discuss peacekeeping logistics.

In Accra, Ghana, a top aide to President Charles Taylor again pledged the Liberian leader would leave the day the Nigerian troops arrive. “When the interposition force arrives, Mr Taylor will leave,” Lewis Brown said.

Rebels, pressing home a three-year war to oust Taylor, derided his most recent promises to surrender control.

“Taylor is just bluffing,” rebel spokesman Kabineh Ja’neh said in Ghana. “You know how many times he has said this kind of thing? We’ll make sure he leaves.”

Africa’s first republic, Liberia was founded by freed American slaves with US government support in the 19th century.

Since June, rebels have launched three waves of attacks on Monrovia. Fighting has killed hundreds of trapped civilians in the capital.

Cut off from the city’s cemeteries by the battles, aid workers, their faces masked, buried victims of fighting on Monrovia’s beaches yesterday, shovelling corpses into the sand under driving rain next to the stormy, steel-gray Atlantic.

More dead lay uncollected in the streets – making the death toll since the latest surge in fighting impossible to calculate.

US Ambassador John Blaney condemned the attacks as ”senseless violence” and expressed “deepest sympathies regarding the tragic loss of life” in a joint statement with US defence officials at the embassy.

Explosions boomed and gunfire rattled in the city yesterday, despite a rebel pledge to cease-fire. More than 100 injured arrived at the city’s main hospital.

By midday, rebels based in the city’s north-western port area had crossed Stockton Bridge into the New Georgia suburb. Government forces – many of them teenagers armed with AK-47s and grenade launchers – beat back the rebel advance by dusk.

Women clutched the hands of children as thousands fled east, away from the fighting, in heavy rain.

Major aid agencies also urged Europe and the US to send peacekeepers to stop the bloodshed.

The agencies Save the Children, Action Aid, Christian Aid and Cafod accused US President George W Bush of “prevaricating” while the West African nation descended into anarchy.

Aid workers have been logging 350 new cholera cases a week, and expect the epidemic to surge as civilians draw water from an inadequate number of wells, many contaminated.