Naomi Campbell contradicted in court over diamonds

Naomi Campbell accepted a late-night gift of diamonds Charles Taylor had promised her over dinner and boasted about it the next day, actress Mia Farrow and the supermodel’s ex-agent told judges yesterday.

Ms Farrow and Ms Campbell’s then agent, Carole White, both contradicted the model’s own evidence to the Liberian ex-President’s war crimes trial that she did not know who sent the parcel of gems.

According to Ms White, Ms Campbell and Mr Taylor had flirted throughout a charity dinner hosted by South Africa’s then President Nelson Mandela in September 1997.

At one point, “she told me: ‘he is going to give me some diamonds’,” Ms White said. “She was very excited.”

Mr Taylor, seated near the model at the dinner, “was agreeing there was something, a gift coming of diamonds. He was smiling and nodding in agreement,” Ms White said.

After dinner, Ms Campbell discussed with Mr Taylor and two other men “how to get the diamonds to Naomi”, and two men arrived later that night at the guesthouse where the model and her agent were staying.

“They took out a quite scruffy paper and handed it to Ms Campbell and said: ‘These are the diamonds’,” Ms White testified. “She showed it to me. She was quite disappointed because they were not shiny.”

Ms White said there were about six rough stones.

Prosecutors are trying to link the gift to Mr Taylor, whom they accuse of having taken a consignment of uncut diamonds to South Africa “to sell... or exchange them for weapons” for Sierra Leone rebels.

Mr Taylor, 62, is on trial for his alleged role in the 1991-2001 Sierra Leone civil war that claimed some 120,000 lives.

He 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.

Ms Campbell had told judges last Thursday that two men brought a pouch containing two or three “dirty-looking stones” to her bedroom at the presidential guesthouse in Pretoria.