Charles Taylor disappears

Recently, Liberia requested that former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor be arrested and shipped to the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, which indicted him from war crimes.. Nigeria said Liberia should come take him themselves. While the diplomatic spat between Nigeria and Liberia went on, the Nigerian government supposedly put Taylor under de facto house arrest in his villa in southeast Nigeria, where he was staying in exile. Shock of shocks, Taylor has disappeared from the villa.

Taylor escaped? Who could've imagined such a possibility?

Humiliated Nigerian president Olesegun Obasanjo professed to be 'very shocked' and promised an investigation. Yet, if he'd arrested Taylor and put him on a plane directly to Sierra Leone like the Liberian government, like the UN Tribunal wanted and like international law required, this wouldn't have happened.

Human Rights Watch's West Africa chief rightly attacked Obasanjo: "This is a serious indictment of Nigeria's commitment to peace and security in Liberia, to seeing justice done for victims of the violence in Sierra Leone and to the fight against impunity throughout Africa."