Campbell allegedly got 'huge diamond'

This photo taken of a monitor shows Mia Farrow testifying before a war crimes trial in The Hague Monday. Photo: AFP

US actress Mia Farrow testified Monday that Naomi Campbell named Charles Taylor as the man who sent a "huge diamond" to the supermodel's room in 1997, at the ex-Liberian president's war crimes trial.

"She (Campbell) said that in the night she had been awakened. Some men were knocking at her door. They were sent by Charles Taylor and they had given her a huge diamond," Farrow told the special tribunal in The Hague.

Farrow, as well as Campbell's former agent, Carole White, were called to testify Monday about a charity dinner hosted by then-South African president Nelson Mandela in September 1997, after which two men brought a parcel of diamonds to Campbell's room at a guesthouse.

The two women have both contradicted Campbell's evidence that she did not know who had sent her the late-night gift.

Prosecutors are trying to link the gift to Taylor, who they accuse of having taken a consignment of rough diamonds to South Africa "to sell ... or exchange them for weapons" for Sierra Leone rebels.

Taylor, 62, is accused of receiving illegally mined "blood diamonds" for arming rebels who murdered, raped and maimed Sierra Leone civilians, amputating their limbs and carving initials on their bodies.

Wearing a dark pinstriped suit, Farrow said on the witness stand that Campbell had talked of the gift at breakfast the next morning.

The model was smiling and "seemed excited, happy," as she told the group of the gift she said she "intended to give to Nelson Mandela's children's charities," the actress said.

Campbell told judges in her testimony Thursday that the men gave her a pouch containing two or three "dirty-looking stones," which South African police have since identified as rough diamonds.

However, she insisted she did not know whom the gift came from, though she "assumed" it was Taylor.

"Naomi Campbell said they came from Charles Taylor," testified Farrow, who remembers the supermodel as having been "quite excited." "It was sort of an unforgettable moment ... when she came to the breakfast table and said she had received a diamond from Charles Taylor."

Asked why she had not come forward before being approached by the prosecution last year, Farrow said she did not know the incident would be "so consequential."

"Yes, I regret that I didn't put it together earlier, I suppose."

White also is expected to challenge Campbell's version of events, having told prosecutors that Taylor and her ex-protege were "mildly flirtatious" throughout the dinner, and that she heard him promise the model a gift of diamonds.

"It was arranged that he would send some men back with the gift," state the notes of an interview that prosecutors had with White in May.

When the delivery came, White "thought that Ms. Campbell was disappointed because she thought she was going to get a big shiny diamond and these just looked like pebbles."

AFP