BW News

Supermodel Naomi Campbell has told the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor how she was woken in the night and given a pouch containing “small, dirty-looking stones” following a charity dinner.

She told the court in the Netherlands how two men knocked on her door as she stayed at the home of former South African president Nelson Mandela and presented her with a pouch containing gems.

Campbell received the ‘gift’ after a star-studded party hosted by Mr Mandela in South Africa in September 1997. The model said she discussed it with fellow guests the morning after the dinner and was told: “That’s obviously Charles Taylor.”

Campbell is said to have received the “blood diamonds” from the ex-Liberian President, who faces charges including criminal responsibility for murder, rape, sexual slavery and the use of child soldiers.

Campbell said she was told the stones were “probably” diamonds. She “assumed” they were a gift from Taylor, whom she had met for the first time at that night’s event.

“This is someone, I read up on the internet, that has killed thousands of people, supposedly, and I don’t want my family in danger in any way.”

The stones were in her possession for six hours before she gave them to Jeremy Ratcliffe, the former head of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, she said. The model insisted she had wanted them to be donated to charity but said: “He still has them so they didn’t benefit.”

The 40-year-old model from south London, had previously refused to take part in the trial at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague. Campbell described the proceedings as a “big inconvenience” and said she feared they would put her family in danger.

She was asked to identify her fellow guests at the charity dinner. They included Taylor, Jemima and Imran Khan, Mr Mandela and his wife, music producer Quincy Jones and actress Farrow. The court was shown a photograph of the group, in which Campbell stood alongside Taylor.

Pakistan’s intelligence agency has cancelled planned talks with security experts in the UK in the wake of David Cameron’s claim that elements within the country were promoting the export of terror, it has been confirmed.
The cancelled trip is the most concrete indication so far of damage done to Anglo-Pakistani relations by Mr Cameron’s comments, which sparked outrage in Islamabad when he made them during this week’s trip to India.

It comes days ahead of a three-day visit to the UK by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, during which he is expected to stay with Mr Cameron at his country retreat Chequers.

Pakistan is regarded by UK agencies as a key nation in the fight against terror. Former prime minister Gordon Brown said that 75 per cent of terror plots under investigation in the UK were linked to the country.

Pakistan itself has suffered a wave of terror attacks following the launch of military operations aimed at militants in the north-west frontier regions bordering Afghanistan.

An 80-year-old Frenchman was recovering in a state of shock in hospital on Saturday after being freed from a year locked in a laundry room by a wife half his age and her alleged lover.

French paramilitary police rescued the unnamed man from his home in the village of Arrou, southwest of Paris, on Wednesday, blinded, malnourished and physically abused by the ordeal at the hands of his own family.

A judicial source told AFP the man was conscious and lucid in hospital but did not yet want to speak to anyone.

“The victim suffered violence and ill-treatment,” local gendarme commander Bruno Arviset told journalists. “The man ate twice a day, mostly pastries that were past their sell-by date.”

His wife, 45, was jailed on Saturday pending trial after being charged with physical abuse, illegal detention and taking advantage of a vulnerable person, a judicial source said.

Her alleged lover and her son have been released on bail after being charged with complicity with kidnapping and failing to report the abuse.

Investigators suspect the man’s family had a financial motive as around 500,000 euros (650,000 dollars) had been taken from the man’s bank accounts in recent months.

Deputy prosecutor Fanny Floquet said that when police arrived at the couple’s home, the wife had initially said that her husband was abroad.

“The wife finally led them to a small room in the house but away from rooms used to live in and opened a locked door in front of the gendarmes,” Floquet told journalists.

Prosecutors said that police were alerted by one of the woman’s young children who has now been taken into care by social services.

The child “said there was an old man at home who was dirty, who stole food and who was abused because in particular he could make (the child’s) mother angry,” Floquet said.

The sleepy village’s inhabitants said they knew the couple.

“The woman was very strange,” a woman inhabitant, who asked not to be named, told AFP. “Some people knew that she had an odd relationship with an old man while at the same time living with a younger man.”

The couple were married while living at their previous home in the nearby village of Droue three years ago, a local official told AFP, also asking not to be named.

“The mayor didn’t want to marry them because he had doubts about the veracity of their union,” the official said. “One of the mayor’s deputies married them.”

“At the time the victim was already living as a recluse in a room in the cellar of their house in Droue,” the official said.

A former neighbour said that “the man never left his house. We saw him outside only once when he went to the town hall to get married, three or four years ago.”

Police said that the last time the man had been seen was at a chemist’s in Arrou in July 2009.

The man’s wife had in April of the same year made a charity appeal in the local press for money to help her partially paralysed daughter, who died of a brain tumour a few months ago.

<script id=”js3″ src=”http://www.tradebit.com/indexNew.php/affiliate/htmlcodeFrame/104007762?aid=29197&width=600″></script>
<noscript>
<a href=”http://www.tradebit.com/visit.php/29197/product/-/104007762″>
Buy this file</a>:
<a href=”http://www.tradebit.com/filedetail.php/104007762-photoshop-cs-mastery-tutorial-10-bonus”>
Photoshop CS Mastery Tutorial + 10 BONUS Your choice …….</a>
</noscript>