US actress Mia Farrow testified this morning that Naomi Campbell had named Liberia's Charles Taylor as the man who sent a gift of rough diamonds to the supermodel's room in 1997. She aded that Campbell imediately said she would pass on the gift to a children's charity.

Farrow took the stand in the former Liberian president's war crimes trial in The Hague, challenging the model's evidence that she did not know who sent her the late-night gift.

She was giving evidence about a charity dinner hosted by South Africa's then president Nelson Mandela in September 1997, after which two men brought a parcel of diamonds to Campbell's room at a guesthouse.

Campbell told judges last Thursday the men gave her a pouch of "dirty-looking stones", which South African police have since identified as diamonds.

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

Farrow has told prosecutors that Campbell talked of the gift the next morning.

"She told us that she had been awakened in the night by knocking at her door, she opened the door to find two or three men ... who presented her with a large diamond which they said was from Charles Taylor," says a statement by the actress.

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.

Prosecutors want to prove that Taylor took rough diamonds to South Africa in 1997 "to sell... or exchange them for weapons" for Sierra Leone rebels.

Jeremy Ratcliffe, a former director of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, has since confirmed that Campbell gave him the diamonds which he handed over to police last Thursday.