JOHANNESBURG, South Africa, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- The former head of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund says he has surrendered uncut diamonds that may have come from Liberian strongman Charles Taylor.
Jeremy Ractliffe told the BBC he turned the diamonds over to Hawks police in South Africa after supermodel Naomi Campbell testified this week at Taylor's war crimes trial in The Hague. Ractliffe said Campbell gave him three uncut stones during a trip on the famed South African Blue Train in 1997.
The special police unit confirmed to the BBC that it received the diamonds Thursday. They will be tested to try to determine where they were mined.
Campbell said she got some diamonds after she and Taylor both attended a dinner hosted by Mandela, who was then president of South Africa, and that they were brought to her hotel room by two men she did not know. She said she did not know whether they were Taylor's emissaries.
Ractliffe said he told Campbell he could not accept the diamonds on behalf of the fund because they might be illegal. He said he decided to hang on to them because Campbell might have broken the law if she took them out of South Africa.
