Fighting rages in Liberia despite 'cease-fire'

MONROVIA, Liberia -- Heavy fighting raged in Liberia's besieged capital Wednesday despite rebel declarations of a cease-fire, with President Charles Taylor's troops battling rebels trying to advance on his downtown stronghold.\nMortar shells crashed into neighborhoods of tin-roof shacks overnight, killing at least one person and wounding eight adults and a dozen children on the government-controlled side of the capital, aid workers said.\nTaylor's forces fired volleys of rocket-propelled grenades at the rebel-held port area.\n"There is nothing like a cease-fire here," said Kate Wright, a downtown resident who spent a sleepless night cowering in a basement-level business center with neighbors.\nOther people slept on city beaches, feeling safer in the soft sand than in their own homes.\nStray bullets from fighting near two bridges hit far into the capital, pinging into the neighborhood around the U.S. Embassy and scattering a crowd gathered there to draw water from a stream.\nTaylor's military chief, Gen. Benjamin Yeaten, said rebels were attempting to cross the bridges into central Monrovia despite a pledge late Tuesday to stop fighting and pull back to the port to await the arrival of a long-awaited international peace force.\n"The fighting is still heavy here," Yeaten said from his headquarters overlooking the bridges. "We are in a fierce exchange of fire with enemy forces." Rebel leaders could not be reached for comment.\nUnder pressure from the Bush administration, which has been insisting that Taylor leave, the rebel group announced a new cease-fire late Tuesday. It was the latest in a series of truce declarations in recent weeks that have been repeatedly flouted by fighters on both sides.\nInsurgents have fought a 3-year-old war to capture Monrovia and topple Taylor, a U.S.-educated business student and Libyan-trained guerrilla fighter whose own uprising in 1989 launched Liberia into 14 years of near-perpetual conflict.\nThe main, northern-based rebel group has made three pushes into Liberia's capital, a city of 1 million people overflowing with hundreds of thousands of refugees. Its troops are holding Monrovia's port, cutting off food and other vital aid for the hungry, disease-ridden city.