Liberia's second city falls to rebels

11.30am

MONROVIA - Rebels battling to oust President Charles Taylor seized Liberia's second city today and attacked another key town, paving the way for a pincer attack on the crumbling capital Monrovia.

The port city of Buchanan fell to rebels from the Model group, residents and a government military commander said.

"Model rebels have captured Buchanan, but we are massing our troops outside to retake the city," the commander told Reuters.

The other major rebel movement, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd), said it had taken Gbarnga, a key settlement on the main highway between Liberia and Ivory Coast in the centre of the crippled West African country.

Battles raged in the heart of Monrovia for the 10th consecutive day as residents darted to and fro in search of food in a torrential tropical downpour and a rain of zinging bullets.

People set buckets and bowls under tin roofs to collect rainwater to drink. Others slayed dogs and cats to stave off growing hunger as food supplies ran short and prices soared.

Lurd rebels have failed to capture two key bridges leading to the heart of the city in days of fighting.

But the battle tied down some of Taylor's forces while Model attacked Buchanan, about 90km southeast of the capital.

Earlier Liberia's Defence Minister Daniel Chea said government troops were battling Model rebels in Buchanan.

"It doesn't seem as though anyone is respecting the ceasefire anymore," he told Reuters from close to the port.

Residents of Buchanan said rebels fired jubilantly into the air and broke into shops to let local people get food.

A US call for Lurd to pull out of Monrovia and let African peacekeepers deploy fell on deaf ears. UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan said Lurd's "reckless behaviour" was disqualifying the rebels from any future role in Liberia.

"We are prepared to pull back for peacekeepers but not for Taylor," Lurd's leader Sekou Conneh told Reuters by telephone.

The government says 1000 civilians have been killed in the latest attack on the capital battered by 14 years of violence.

Scores have been killed in volleys of mortar fire.

Taylor's foes are bent on ousting the former warlord, who came to power in a 1997 poll after waging a seven-year civil war along ethnic lines in which some 200,000 people were killed.

Taylor, who has been indicted by a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, has agreed under US pressure to quit if peacekeepers come to Liberia.

However West African officials and US military experts, who met in Ghana's capital Accra on Monday, failed to set a date for deployment, and recognised that re-establishing a tattered ceasefire was necessary before the first soldiers could arrive.

The regional bloc Ecowas has said troops will arrive some time this week. West African leaders have pledged to deploy some 1300 Nigerian soldiers as a vanguard force of a larger mission.

In Abuja, a Nigerian army spokesman said an announcement might be made as early as Tuesday.

As the humanitarian situation worsens in the capital, Liberians' cries for intervention, either by African soldiers or the United States, have grown ever louder.

Liberians look up to the United States as a big brother because their country was founded by freed American slaves more than 150 years ago.

But the United States has also long been seen by Liberian authorities as a covert ally of the rebels because of its military aid to Guinea -- Lurd's main backer.

The State Department said on Monday it was sending its assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Walter Kansteiner, to meet West African leaders. His exact itinerary has not been decided.

Three US warships are sailing towards Liberia, though their role will be largely to support the West African force and there is no suggestion yet that US troops will deploy.

The European Union's presidency called for a peacekeeping force to be sent swiftly, and said it would support such a force. Officials declined to say if such support might include troops, though a diplomatic source said the statement referred to financial support.

Aid workers said there were no reports of starvation, but hunger was growing. The traditional staple of green leaf sauce with rice has often become little more than the sauce.

"There is food available in some areas, but it's the access that is difficult," said Dominique Liengme of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

- REUTERS