NAIROBI, March 29 (Xinhua) -- The UN helicopter carrying former Liberian president Charles Taylor arrived in the Sierra Leone capital Freetown Wednesday at the UN compound of war-crimes tribunal where he is wanted for trial, according to reports reaching here from Sierra Leone.

    Former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who disappeared from his residence in southeastern Nigeria one day ago, was on Wednesday detained in a state bordering Cameroon.

    Taylor has been living in Nigeria since August 2003 when he accepted Nigeria's offer of safe exile as part of a deal, backed by the U.S. government, to end Liberia's 14-year-old civil war that killed about 250,000 people, about eight percent of the west African country's population.

    But by then, Taylor had been indicted on 17 counts by the special court in Sierra Leone, for crimes against humanity and war crimes for fueling the civil war there, when he allegedly supported rebels against the Sierra Leonean government in return for "bloody diamonds."

    Nigeria, which initially vowed to protect Taylor with all its might, chose to agree to hand him over to a democratically-elected government of Liberia in late 2004, under the pressure of the U.S. government Enditem