FREETOWN, Sierra Leone ? Nigerian security forces encouraged former Liberian President Charles Taylor to flee, his spiritual adviser said Sunday, calling into question Nigeria’s repeated denials that it was complicit in Taylor’s attempt to evade a war crimes trial.

Taylor, the first former African president to be charged with crimes against humanity, is to appear today before a tribunal that is bent on sending a powerful message to despots that no one is above the law.

He has repeatedly declared his innocence and will be asked to enter a plea to 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including sexual slavery and mutilation. His Liberian lawyers said they will argue for the case to be dismissed.

Taylor’s spiritual adviser, the Indian evangelist Kilari Anand Paul, said Taylor told him Saturday in a phone call from jail that State Security Service agents came with two vehicles to his Calabar villa the night of March 28.

Taylor said “they escorted him to the north, way off toward Cameroon and, in the middle of nowhere, told him to go. He said, ‘Where are you guys going?’ And they said they received instructions to leave him and they left,” according to Paul, who spoke from his home in Houston.

Nigeria again denied the allegation.

“The story is a far-fetched figment of his jaundiced imagination,” a spokesman for the Nigerian leader, Femi Fani-Kayode, told The Associated Press. “He must have been reading too many James Bond novels.”

The compound of blue roof buildings, and Special Court for Sierra Leone, with brown walls at centre, where former Liberian president Charles Taylor could be appearing, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Saturday, April, 1, 2006. The toppled Liberian president Taylor, who once escaped from an American prison is being carefully guarded as he awaits trial on war crimes charges in an international court Monday.

For two days, Nigeria had resisted calls from the United States, human rights organizations and others to arrest Taylor to ensure that he would stand trial.

He was arrested Wednesday in northern Nigeria and taken to the war tribunal in Sierra Leone, established to try those seen as bearing greatest responsibility for atrocities during Sierra Leone’s 1991-2002 civil war.

Some questioned the timing of Taylor’s capture – a day after Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo had left for a trip to the U.S., where the White House suggested he would not be meeting with President Bush unless he could answer questions about Taylor’s disappearance.

At the war crimes tribunal, Taylor is accused of backing Sierra Leonean rebels notorious for maiming civilians by chopping off their arms, legs, ears and lips. In return for supporting them, he allegedly got a share of Sierra Leone’s diamond wealth he used to fund his ambitions in Liberia.

Taylor is making his initial appearance in Sierra Leone, but Special Court officials have requested that an international court in The Hague, Netherlands, host the trial.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has expressed fear that if the trial occurs in the region, Taylor’s supporters could use it as an excuse to mount another insurgency in her country.