MONROVIA, July 4: Liberia’s President Charles Taylor, under US pressure to quit, said on Friday he had agreed to step down but urged the world to send peacekeepers to prevent chaos in the aftermath.

A senior Nigerian official said the former warlord, suspected of instigating a tangle of West African conflicts and hunted by a war crimes court in Sierra Leone, had accepted an offer of asylum.

Mr Taylor’s departure has been called essential for peace by US President George Bush, who visits Africa next week and is mulling the possibility of sending hundreds of troops to help end nearly 14 years of non-stop violence in Liberia.

“The important thing here is for international peacekeepers to come to Liberia as quickly as possible to take charge of the situation if I am going to step down,” Taylor told reporters outside the presidential mansion, warning that if they did not it “could be extremely chaotic”.

“The ball is in the international community’s court,” he said.

Mr Taylor has been under growing pressure to quit since some 700 people were killed last month in rebel attacks on Monrovia. The insurgents hold nearly two-thirds of a country founded more than 150 years ago by freed American slaves.

A senior official in regional giant Nigeria said Taylor had accepted an offer of asylum and been told he should take it up this month instead of within 40 days as he had requested.

When asked, Mr Taylor did not deny that he had accepted. But he said it was not the most important issue for now.

“Leaving to go into a foreign land, into exile, leaving my people that I know I can still be of help to, it is a pill that would be very difficult to swallow,” he told a gathering of religious leaders earlier on Friday.

BUSH MULLING TROOPS: Bush said on Thursday he had made no decision on sending US troops but that the “first step” was for Taylor to leave.