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President Charles Taylor said last week he would soon invite the Sierra Leonean ambassador in Liberia to visit military bases there to prove his government is not training Sierra Leonean dissidents, the Liberian News Agency (LINA) reported.
Taylor was responding to recent media reports that Liberia was harbouring dissidents and that former Sierra Leonean Revolutionary United Front (RUF) commander Sam Bockarie was training rebels in Lofa County, northern Liberia, on the border with Sierra Leone and Guinea.
RUF spokesman Eldred Collins, based in Freetown, told IRIN that Bockarie was no longer a part of the movement. Collins said he had no reports that Bockarie was training guerrillas.
Taylor added that Liberia would never be used as a platform for
aggression against other countries in the subregion. As members of the Mano River Union; Liberia, Guinea and Sierra have undertaken never to allow dissidents to operate from their territories in attacking other governments.
ECOMOG and Sierra Leone security agents arrested a group of suspected Liberian dissidents on 22 March in Sierra Leone. Two subsequent attempts by alleged armed dissidents to cross the border into Liberia had also failed, the BBC reported last week. In one of the attempts, it said, 55 dissidents led by a former general of one of the armed factions in the Liberian civil war, were arrested.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions