Activists held over Taylor row
2005-08-04 13:56
Lagos - Nigerian secret police have detained three human rights activists campaigning for their government to hand former Liberian leader Charles Taylor to a war crimes tribunal, Amnesty International said on Thursday.
The international pressure group said Steve Omali and Michael Damisa were arrested on Monday at Abuja international airport by officers of the State Security Service (SSS), who found them carrying a copy of Taylor's Interpol arrest warrant.
On Tuesday's Damisa's brother Michael was also detained when he visited SSS headquarters to ask what had happened, the group said. All three men remain in custody.
Summons issued
Officers have also visited the headquarters of the detainees' human rights group, the Open Society Justice Initiative, and issued a summons for its chairperson, Chidi Odinkalu.
"The unlawful arrest and detention of innocent citizens and harassment of human rights defenders constitute a flagrant violation of the Nigerian constitution and international standards," Kolawole Olaniyan, Amnesty's Africa director, said in a statement.
"It is ironic that the Nigerian government, instead of turning over Charles Taylor, a man indicted for crimes against humanity, to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, in fact turns against its own citizens and arrests them unlawfully," he complained.
Mounting international pressure
Taylor, a former warlord who fought his way to power in Liberia at the head of a brutal army of guerrillas and child soldiers, fled Monrovia in August 2003 amid a mounting humanitarian crisis as a rebel army besieged his capital.
President Olusegun Obasanjo invited him to live in Nigeria in order to smooth his exit and allow a United Nations-backed transitional regime to take power and prepare for multiparty elections, which are due later this year.
In the meantime, however, international prosecutors at a UN-backed tribunal in Liberia's neighbour Sierra Leone have issued a warrant for Taylor's arrest on charges that he sponsored war crimes carried out by rebels during that country's civil war in the 1990s.
Obasanjo has defied international pressure for him to hand over Taylor - who lives in a luxury waterfront villa in the southeastern Nigeria city of Calabar - and has insisted he would only surrender his guest to an elected Liberian government.