Sure hope Naomi Campbell didn't have plans on lying to The Hauge about those blood diamonds she received from former Liberian leader Charles Taylor, because her former agent already testified that she got 6 of them!
Former Liberian leader Charles Taylor is said to have provided arms to rebel soldiers in neighbouring Sierra Leone in return for rough, uncut ‘blood diamonds’ — so called because they’re often mined in a war zone and then ‘sold’ on to finance bloody insurgencies — smuggled out of the country in jars of mayonnaise.
He denies ever possessing such gems, and all the charges against him. Naomi Campbell’s testimony, then, is vital to the case against him.
And this week, after repeatedly refusing to be formally interviewed about the incident, Naomi was ordered by court officials to appear before the Special Court on July 29 to testify or ‘show good cause why’ she cannot.
Campbell, who is dating Russian billionaire property mogul Vladimir Doronin, says that she fears for the safety of her family if she gets involved.
Most intriguingly of all, the 40- year-old supermodel has denied the diamond story outright. ‘I didn’t receive a diamond and I’m not going to speak about that, thank you,’ she told ABC news in April before flouncing off camera, apparently knocking it over in the process.
One who spoke to the Mail this week, Campbell’s former agent Carole White, said: ‘There were six small diamonds. They weren’t cut. They were in a bit of paper. I saw them. I had them in my hand.’
The supermodel’s trip to South Africa in the early autumn was, without doubt, motivated only by her desire to help Nelson Mandela’s Children’s Fund, a charity he set up in 1994 not long after becoming President of a newly-democratic South Africa.
Mandela had personally invited her to attend the celebrity-studded inauguration journey of The Blue Train, South Africa’s answer to the Orient Express.
‘Naomi did a lot of charity work for Nelson Mandela,’ says Carole White, owner of Premier Model Management in London, who accompanied Campbell on the trip. ‘His charity was connected to the promotion so it was just a thing she did. It was a good thing for her to do.’
During the 27-hour, 1,000-mile journey from Pretoria to Cape Town, travelling through some of the most spectacular scenery in Africa, Campbell dined on zebra and rubbed shoulders with other high profile guests such as actress Mia Farrow, cricketer Imran Khan and his then wife Jemima, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Michael Jackson’s producer Quincy Jones as well as Mandela and his future wife Graca Machel.
Read the entire report here
