Charles Taylor: profile of a warlord He was sacked on suspicion of embezzling more than USD1 million, and fled to the US, where he was arrested but managed to escape jail. He then disappeared, but is understood to have spent several years in Libya being trained in guerrilla warfare by Colonel Gaddafi's closest military advisers. From there, his assault on his home country began. Starting with a coup on Christmas Eve 1989, which he announced to the world via a phone call to a BBC radio studio, he soon took control of Liberia. His forces were bolstered by child soldiers, press-ganged into the Small Boys Unit and fed a diet of drugs to keep them at the front line. As neighbouring Sierra Leone fell into deeper into civil war, Mr Taylor, now ruling most of Liberia with an iron grip, saw a chance to profit. He would exchange guns for diamonds, which could then be sold on to finance his own campaigns, prosecutors in his trial claim. He denies all the charges. He won the Liberian presidency after polls in 1997 during which his supporters adopted the unofficial slogan of "he killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I'll vote for him anyway." He was only ejected from power when rivals took control of Monrovia, Liberia's capital, in 2003. He lived in exile as a guest of the Nigerian government for a further three years, before being arrested trying to flee into Cameroon in a Range Rover stuffed with stolen cash. He was handed over to the UN, and from there to the court's officers.