Ex-Liberian Leader Pleads Not Guilty

Charles Taylor Is Defiant At International War Crimes Trial

(AP)  Security was tight. Taylor — and court officials who have received death threats — were protected by bulletproof glass and by dozens of U.N. peacekeepers from Mongolia and Ireland.

Taylor faces 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with alleged backing of Sierra Leonean rebels. He has repeatedly declared he is innocent of charges that include mutilation, sexual slavery and sending children into combat.

A Liberian lawyer had said the defense strategy would be to argue that the Sierra Leone court has no jurisdiction over Liberia or its head of state and so no right to try Taylor, who was president when he was indicted in 2003.

Taylor appeared to allude to that Monday. The court's appeals chamber had rejected a similar argument made soon after the indictment was filed.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has expressed fear that Taylor's supporters could use a trial in the region as an excuse to mount another insurgency in her country, one that could, like Liberia's last war, spill across the region.

Taylor won a disputed election in Liberia in 1997. Many former allies in an insurgency he had launched in 1989 took up arms against him in 2000 and attacked Monrovia in 2003.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo helped broker peace in Liberia by offering Taylor exile in Nigeria. The former president traveled to Nigeria in August 2003, five months after his Special Court indictment, as part of a deal to end fighting in Liberia.

Nigeria, under pressure from the United States and others, said last week it would hand over Taylor, but made no move to arrest him. Taylor fled and was captured within a day by Nigerian police who found him trying to slip across the Nigerian-Cameroonian border on Wednesday.

Taylor's spiritual adviser, Kilari Anand Paul, said Sunday that Taylor told him in a phone call from jail that Nigerian security forces had encouraged him to flee, and that he felt betrayed by Obasanjo.

Nigeria vehemently denied the allegation.

"He (Taylor) should stop telling tales. The story is a far-fetched figment of his jaundiced imagination," a spokesman for the Nigerian leader, Femi Fani-Kayode, told The Associated Press. "He must have been reading too many James Bond novels."