THE HAGUE (AFP) – Supermodel Naomi Campbell told a court Thursday how she received a pouch of rough diamonds as a late-night gift she assumed came from a former Liberian president in the dock for war crimes.
Demurely but stylishly dressed, the catwalk queen told judges it was a "big inconvenience" to have to testify about a bag of "dirty-looking pebbles" in Charles Taylor's trial at The Hague for murder, rape and enslavement.
"I really didn't want to be here," she said. "Obviously I just want to get this over with and get on with my life."
Campbell said she was woken by a knock on her bedroom door at a guesthouse after meeting Taylor at a celebrity dinner hosted by then South African president Nelson Mandela in September 1997, and handed a pouch she only opened the next morning.
"I saw a few stones in there. Very small, dirty-looking stones ... maybe three, two or three," Campbell, 40, said of the gift delivered by two men she did not know.
At breakfast the next morning, she told her then agent Carole White and actress Mia Farrow about the gift, both of whom assumed the stones were diamonds.
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