A top-level west African delegation visited Liberia's embattled President Charles Taylor yesterday just four days before he is due to resign and prepare to leave his war-torn country, officials said.

Taylor received Ecowas executive secretary Mohamed ibn Chambas, the regional bloc's chief Liberia negotiator and former Nigerian military ruler Abdusalami Abubakar and its peacekeeping commander General Festus Okonkwo.

The civilian officials later left Liberia for Nigeria, but Okonkwo will remain in Monrovia, where he is head of the newly deployed Ecomil west African peacekeeping force, which began patrols in the besieged city yesterday.

Taylor, a warlord who became Liberia's elected president in 1997 after a nine-year civil war, is wanted by UN war crimes investigators and is seen by the international community as an impediment to a new peace process.

For almost five years he has been fighting a new generation of rebels and has agreed to step down on Monday as part of moves to find peace and lift a two-month siege of the capital that has left 250 000 people homeless.

He repeated yesterday in a television interview that he would leave Liberian shortly after handing over power to vice-president Moses Blah and take up an offer of political asylum in Nigeria.

No details emerged immediately of Taylor's meeting with the west African trio, but the officials were thought to have come to discuss the Ecomil mission, the distribution of aid and Taylor's eventual departure. – Sapa-AFP.