Nigeria: Ex-Liberian Leader Missing

Charles Taylor slipped away just as the fast-talking, U.S.-educated economist accused of fomenting two savage wars seemed set to become the first African leader to face trial for crimes against humanity.

Nigeria, which had granted Taylor asylum under an internationally brokered agreement in 2003 that helped end Liberia's 14-year civil war, said Monday he disappeared a day earlier. The admission came three days after Nigeria, under pressure from Washington and others, reluctantly bowed to pressure to surrender Taylor to face justice.

The statement was released just an hour before Obasanjo left Abuja, the Nigerian capital, on a presidential jet headed for Washington, where he was scheduled to meet President Bush on Wednesday.

On Monday, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said, "The U.S. is deeply concerned by reports that Charles Taylor has fled. The bottom line is that this guy has to be transferred to the special court on Sierra Leone and that the government of Nigeria play a role in this." The United States had told Obasanjo that it was Nigeria's responsibility to "see that he is able to be conveyed and face justice," the State Department said.

CBS' Charles Wolfson reports Ereli said the U.S. embassy in Abuja was working with the Nigerian government to determine Taylor's whereabouts.

Information Minister Frank Nweke told the BBC that Obasanjo was "shocked" by Taylor's disappearance.

Even though Nigeria had announced it would hand Taylor over, it had made no moves to arrest him.

A government statement said Obasanjo was creating a panel to investigate Taylor's disappearance. The statement raised the possibility he might have been abducted, but did not elaborate.

Nigerian presidential spokeswoman 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.

Taylor's residence in Calabar stood all-but deserted on Tuesday. About 10 uniformed Nigerian policemen could be seen from afar inside the hillside compound of red-roofed buildings.

Nearby residents said Liberian members of Taylor's coterie, which numbered in the dozens, had begun leaving in recent days.

A Nigerian security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to reporters, said Taylor was in a guarded cavalcade of cars traveling Monday from Calabar to Port Harcourt, site of the nearest airport, when the convoy stopped and he was allowed to flee, possibly spirited away by commandoes.

Johnny Mcclain, Liberia's information minister, said his government would have no comment because Nigeria had not formally informed it of Taylor's disappearance.

Sando Johnson, a longtime Taylor loyalist, expressed concern.

"We hope that wherever Mr. Taylor has gone to, he's going to survive," Johnson said in the Liberian capital. "We knew that calling for his arrest was going to cause trouble and this is just what is happening now."

While the Sierra Leone tribunal's charges refer only to the war there, Taylor also has been accused of starting civil war in Liberia and of harboring al Qaeda suicide bombers who attacked the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 12 Americans and more than 200 Africans.

He is charged with backing Sierra Leone rebel, including child fighters, who terrorized victims by chopping off body parts.

Obasanjo initially resisted calls to surrender Taylor. But Saturday, after Liberia's 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.

Taylor has many possible places to hide, including Burkina Faso, where his friend Blaise Compaore is president, or Congo, large parts of which are uncontrolled and inhabited by rebels from several countries.

Many of Taylor's loyalist soldiers are believed roaming freely in Liberia, Sierra Leone and civil-war divided Ivory Coast, from where Taylor launched his rebel incursion into Liberia on Dec. 24, 1989.

Taylor was accused of backing one rebel group that fought during the 2002-2003 civil war in Ivory Coast, whose western borderlands with Liberia remain restive. A spokesman for the 6,000-troop U.N. peacekeeping force in Ivory Coast, Col. Omar el-Khadir, said that any U.N. forces that encounter Taylor would arrest him, since Taylor is the target of a U.N. travel ban.

The Ivory Coast military that controls the southern part of the country had no immediate comment.

The Libyan-trained guerrilla fighter also is believed to have considerable resources. U.N. investigators have said he and his allies stole from the Liberian treasury even from exile.

Charles MacArthur Taylor, 57, was born into a family of Americo-Liberians, a lighter-skinned elite of perhaps a dozen families descended from the freed Americans that founded Africa's first republic in 1845 and governed, lording it over the indigenous majority, until Master Sgt. Samuel Doe orchestrated a coup in 1980 and had all Cabinet ministers shot in a public execution on the beach.

Like most Americos, Taylor went to university in the United States, studying economics at Bentley College in Massachusetts. There, he participated in protests against the last Americo president, William Tolbert.

When Tolbert was killed in the coup, Taylor joined Doe's government but fled after he was accused in 1983 of embezzling nearly a million dollars. He fled to the United States, but was detained there on a Liberian arrest warrant.

In 1985 he escaped, some say with help from the CIA, to pursue an ambition to topple Doe, a one-time U.S. ally whose brutalities had become an embarrassment.

The war tribunal's indictment says Taylor trained in Libya along with other African rebels who were part of a 10-year strategy by Moammar Gaddafi to get control of several African countries through surrogates.

Taylor's main aim, the indictment says, was to enrich himself from Sierra Leone's rich diamond fields. In Liberia, he stole the proceeds from diamonds, timber and rubber.