A blood diamond expert and an account from a Sierra Leonean miner who said laughing rebels hacked off his hands and burned his family opened the war crimes trial against Liberia's Charles Taylor yesterday.

The former Liberian president, once one of Africa's most feared warlords, faces charges of rape, murder, mutilation and recruitment of child soldiers at the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, set up to try those behind the 1991-2002 war.

Mr Taylor is accused of trying to gain control of the mineral wealth of neighbouring Sierra Leone, particularly its diamond mines, and of seeking to destabilise its government by supplying the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels.

Prosecutors showed scenes from a documentary including a severed hand and the story of the diamond miner, who said RUF rebels cut of his hands and torched his house, killing his wife and children inside.

Witness Ian Smillie, a Canadian expert on the trade in "blood diamonds" smuggled out of Africa to buy arms, said the RUF used brutality to frighten people away from diamond fields that earned them up to $125 million a year.

A generation of civilian amputees - their hands or legs chopped off by rebels - are a painful reminder of the cruelty of the conflict, in which drugged rebels and militia members, often just children, killed, raped and maimed.