Security staff arrested after warlord Taylor 'disappears'

Liberian warlord and war crimes suspect Charles Taylor disappeared from the haven Nigeria had granted him just as he was to have been handed over to face trial, Nigerian officials said today.

Taylor disappeared last night from his villa in the southern town of Calabar, the government said.

Last week, Nigeria reluctantly agreed to surrender him to stand before a UN tribunal on charges related to civil war in his homeland and its neighbour Sierra Leone. But the logistics of his hand-over had not been worked out, and many had expressed fear he would use the delay to slip away.

A government statement said President Olusegun Obasanjo was creating a panel to investigate “the disappearance on Monday night … of Mr Charles Taylor, former Liberian leader, from his residence in Calabar.” The statement raised the possibility he might have been abducted, but did not elaborate on that.

Nigerian presidential spokesman Oluremi Oyo said members of Taylor’s Nigerian security detail had been arrested.

The presidential statement offered no details on how Taylor’s disappearance was discovered or whether he was being hunted. Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper reported today that dozens of people who had been living with Taylor in the villa in a walled government compound had left yesterday and were flying to Lagos en route to an unknown destination.

Obasanjo offered Taylor refuge under an agreement that helped end Liberia’s civil war in 2003. Since then, though, the US, the UN and others have called for Taylor to be handed over to an international war crimes tribunal.

Taylor is accused of starting civil wars in Liberia and its neighbour, Sierra Leone, that killed some three million people, and of harbouring al-Qaida suicide bombers who attacked the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 12 Americans and more than 200 Africans.

Obasanjo initially resisted calls to surrender Taylor. But on Saturday, after Liberia’s new President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf asked that Taylor be handed over for trial, Obasanjo agreed.

African leaders have been reluctant to see the continent’s former presidents or dictators brought to justice, apparently fearful they would be the next to be accused of human rights abuses or other crimes.

Since agreeing on Saturday to hand Taylor over, Obasanjo had been under pressure to ensure Taylor was sent to the UN tribunal sitting in Sierra Leone. Taylor formerly escaped from a US penitentiary in Boston to launch Liberia’s war.

Yesterday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States has told Obasanjo that it was Nigeria’s resonsibility to “see that he is able to be conveyed and face justice”.