LAGOS, March 26 (Xinhua) -- The prosecutor for the UN-backed special court in Sierra Leone, Desmond de Silva, on Sunday asked Nigeria to arrest exiled former Liberian president Charles Taylor to prevent him from escaping.

    The request came one day after Nigeria agreed to return Taylor, accused of 17 counts of crimes against humanity by the court, to his homeland's new administration after two years of pressure from the international community, especially from the U.S. government.

    Taylor was born in 1948 to a Liberian mother and an American-Liberian father, a descendant of the freed American slaves who established the first republic in Africa in the 19th century.

    His father sent him to the United States in 1972 to study economics at Bentley College in Massachusetts, where he took part in protests against then Liberian president William Tolbert.

    After Tolbert was murdered in a coup by Samuel Doe in 1980, Taylor joined Doe's government, but was in 1983 accused of embezzling nearly a million U.S. dollars and fled to the United States, where he was arrested.

    In 1985, he escaped from jail and made his way back to Africa, where he spent the next four years building an armed force.

    In 1989, Taylor and his National Patriotic Front launched an uprising from neighboring Cote d'Ivoire and soon joined forces with Prince Johnson to overthrow Doe. However, after Johnson took control of Monrovia in 1990 and executed Doe, a civil war ensued.

    A peace agreement was reached in 1996, and Taylor was elected president the following year by a wide margin. But his time in office was marked by rebellion and regional conflicts and he was forced into exile in August 2003 after another civil war.

    An estimated 250,000 people were killed in the 14-year civil war, and more than one million were forced from their homes.

    Two months before his exile, Taylor was indicted for war crimes by a UN-backed special court in Sierra Leone, where he is said to have armed and trained rebels, including child soldiers in return for "bloody diamonds." During Sierra Leone's 1991-2002 civil war, an estimated 50,000 people died.

    In November 2003, the United States Congress reportedly passed a bill that included a reward offer of two million dollars for Taylor 's capture. Nigeria described the offer as being tantamount to state-sponsored terrorism.

    In March 2004, the United States presented a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council seeking a freeze of Taylor's assets, as well as those of his family and allies.

    On March 5, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the new democratically elected President of Liberia submitted a formal request to Nigeria for the extradition of Taylor, saying "the time was opportune."

    Taylor now lives in the southeastern Nigerian city of Calabar with about 70 relations and aides. Enditem