Naomi Campbell’s friend admits keeping suspected blood diamonds

It was the gift that no one wanted: three dirty-looking pebbles, presumed to be uncut blood diamonds from then-Liberian President Charles Taylor.

Thirteen years ago, the stones were given to supermodel Naomi Campbell, who tried to donate them to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.

The fund didn’t want them, either.

FOR THE RECORD:
An earlier version of this article misspelled Jeremy Ractliffe’s surname as Ratcliffe.

Campbell handed them to her friend Jeremy Ractliffe, then director of the fund. On Friday, he issued a statement admitting he had secretly kept the suspected diamonds all these years, saying he had been trying to protect the reputations of Campbell, Mandela and his foundation.

“I took them because I thought it might well be illegal for her to take uncut diamonds out of the country,” Ractliffe, still a trustee of the fund, said in the statement released in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The story offered a bizarre insight into the lives of the powerful and famous: a beloved African president, Mandela, hosting a dinner party at his home for Campbell, actress Mia Farrow, cricket star Imran Khan, music producer Quincy Jones and Taylor, a warlord-turned-president.

On Thursday, Campbell told a tribunal trying Taylor in The Hague that she was woken by a knock on her hotel room door late at night after the party and that two unidentified African men handed her a small pouch. She accepted it, Campbell said, without explanation of what it was or who it was from.

After showing the pouch and the stones in it the next morning to Farrow — who told her they must be diamonds from Taylor — Campbell handed them to Ractliffe.

According to Ractliffe, Campbell had suggested they could benefit the children’s fund, “but I told her I would not involve the Nelson Mandela children’s foundation in anything that could possibly be illegal.

“In the end I decided to just keep them,” Ractliffe said in the statement.

A spokesman for a South African special police unit said the stones had been handed to the country’s Diamond Board to be authenticated and have their origin established.

Taylor, who ruled Liberia from 1997 to 2003, is accused of funding rebels in neighboring Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war. The testimony about the diamonds is important to the prosecution’s allegation that Taylor traded diamonds for weapons and ammunition provided to the rebels, many of them child soldiers, who raped, disfigured and killed thousands of civilians.

Taylor denies ever possessing diamonds.

After stepping down in 2003, Taylor received asylum from Olusegun Obasanjo, then president of Nigeria.

After Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf became Liberia’s president in 2006, she pressed the Nigerian leader to hand over Taylor to be tried for war crimes.

Taylor escaped his luxury villa in Nigeria and disappeared but was arrested in March 2006 trying to flee the country with a large bag of money.

robyn.dixon@latimes.com