Displaying human skulls at roadblocks was an effective method of encouraging people to obey soldiers’ orders, Charles Taylor, the former Liberian President, said yesterday at his war crimes trial.

Mr Taylor, giving evidence in his defence, insisted that he saw nothing wrong with using the skulls of his enemies during his coup in Liberia, but insisted that testimony given earlier this year that soldiers under his command strung human entrails across the road, was a lie.

The first African leader to face trial in The Hague told the court on the third day of his testimony that he took a tough line with those who committed atrocities and had some perpetrators executed.

Mr Taylor faces 11 charges of murder, rape, conscripting child soldiers, enslavement and pillaging while allegedly masterminding the brutal 11-year civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone.

“Skulls were used as symbols of death,” he told the judges of the Special Court for Sierra Leone . “These were not our people. Enemy soldiers had been killed and their skulls were used. We did not think that symbol was anything wrong. I did not order them removed.”

His evidence, concerning events in Liberia in 1989-90, appeared to be aimed at undermining allegations at the heart of the prosecution case that the rebels he allegedly backed in Sierra Leone from 1991-2002 used terror tactics, including rape and systematic amputations, to intimidate the population. Mr Taylor has dismissed the allegations as “lies, lies and more lies.”

The skulls used by his rebel fighters at roadblocks were from soldiers killed in clashes with Mr Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia, which invaded the country from the Ivory Coast to oust his predecessor, Samuel Doe. Mr Taylor, 61, described as nonsense the allegation that his troops disembowelled their enemies, but conceded that some atrocities had been committed in Liberia by men under his command. “We found out that they were taking place and we acted to bring those responsible to justice,” he said. “There would be no excesses.”

Mr Taylor is the first defence witness in his landmark trial, which opened in January last year, and in which 91 prosecution witnesses built a case that he commanded Sierra Leone rebels from his presidential mansion in Liberia to enrich himself with “blood diamonds”.

He also denied claims that he sent children into combat during the Liberian invasion, saying that some youngsters accompanied their older brothers into military camps because they had nowhere else to go. The use of child soldiers equipped with automatic weapons they were barely able to carry became a grim feature of the Sierra Leone civil war.

“They were not trained for combat and did not engage in combat. They were used to cook food and to wash clothes, to man the gates and to search vehicles,” said Mr Taylor.

“When you hear reports there were some young men seen in Liberia carrying rifles, these reports are true. What the reports did not say is that the young men were carrying rifles walking with their families but never entered combat.” He also rejected claims that he had ambitions of becoming a regional strongman, suggesting that his country was insignificant compared to some of its neighbours.

“One would have to be cuckoo to believe one could have become a Napoleon. You would have to conquer Nigeria,” he said.

“All I was interested in . . . is trying to solve our little internal problem in Liberia, to build an environment in which our people would have a little peace, democracy and rule of law.”

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