¡¡ Abuja, July 5 (Xinhuanet) -- A coalition of Nigerian opposition political parties on Monday urged the federal government to hand over former Liberian president Charles Taylor to the UN-backed special court in Sierra Leone.

    Taylor, who went into exile in Nigeria last August as rebels besieged the Liberian capital of Monrovia, was accused by the Sierra Leonean court of main backer of the Sierra Leonean rebels.

    However, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo ensured that his country would not succumb to pressure to hand him over for trial though the United States government has offered a reward of 2 million US dollars for his capture.

    The former Liberian president has since lived in Calabar, the capital of Nigeria's southern state of Cross River.

    But the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP) on Monday called on Obasanjo to urgently hand over Taylor to the Sierra Leonean court to defend himself against war crime charges in line with Nigeria's 1999 constitution.

    "The CNPP is of the view that, the tribunal cannot deliver anymeaningful judgment in the (Sierra Leonean) 10-year old civil war,without the mastermind, paymaster and warlord, Charles Taylor, more so when principal actors, Fordeh Sankoh and Sam Bakare, aliasMosquito are dead and John Paul Kromah is on the run."

    The tribunal is currently sitting in Sierra Leone. However, thecase against the rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF),has diminished somewhat with the deaths of founder Sankoh and his top lieutenant Sam "Mosquito" Bockarie and the failure to bring Taylor, himself indicted on 18 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, to trial.

    The RUF launched its attack on Sierra Leone, a diamond-rich west African nation, in 1991 from neighboring Liberia. The war, one of the most brutal in the continent's modern history in which 50,000 people were killed, was declared over in 2002 after a massive UN peacekeeping troops deployment. Enditem