"They said 'You get on and go,' and they left him behind," Indian evangelist Kilari Anand Paul told The Associated Press in a telephone interview late Sunday.

Nigeria vehemently denied the allegation.

"[Taylor] should stop telling tales. 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."

Many were suspicious when Nigeria's government announced Taylor's "disappearance" a week ago, just days after Obasanjo reluctantly agreed to hand him over from the exile haven he had been offered under an internationally brokered peace agreement ending Liberia's 14-year civil war.

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 and taken to the war tribunal in Sierra Leone, where he is to be officially charged Monday afternoon.

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

Diplomats and Nigerian officials who spoke on condition of anonymity suggested Taylor had been allowed to flee. Some speculated he might have been taken by rogue elements in the State Security Service set on embarrassing the president.

At the time, Nigerian authorities said they had arrested the police officers deployed to guard Taylor at his villa in the southern coastal town of Calabar. But a panel of inquiry ordered to investigate the circumstances of his disappearance was disbanded the day he was captured.

Paul said Taylor told him in the phone call from jail Saturday, however, that it was State Security Service agents, and not the normal police guards, who had come with two vehicles to his Calabar villa the night of March 28. Taylor and five or six people in his entourage were ordered into the lead vehicle, and the security agents followed in the second, Paul quoted Taylor as saying.

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, Texas.

Taylor had traveled more than 600 miles (966 kilometers) along Nigerian roads that have numerous checkpoints manned by police, army and customs officials, before reaching the border with Cameroon hours later.

Before he crossed over, Paul said: "the same agents turned up and arrested him ... they had guns and told him to surrender himself."

Paul said Taylor told him he believed his captors thought he would flee, and that the agents had been ordered to kill him, "but they couldn't because he surrendered without any resistance, and because he had five or six people with him."

Later Sunday, Paul included an AP reporter in a telephone conference call with Taylor, who spoke from the heavily guarded detention center of the war tribunal in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The reporter heard Taylor ask Paul to "bring two attorneys. Bring them any way you can. I need somebody to take charge of this defense immediately ... (I need) to put things into motion because we have only 30 days to answer the indictment."

Taylor has been indicted by the U.N.-backed tribunal in Sierra Leone on 11 counts pertaining to Sierra Leone's 11-year civil war, which he is accused of fomenting to plunder its rich diamond fields.