By Mariette le Roux

THE HAGUE, August 5, 2010 (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, now 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.

“One of the two said ‘that is obviously Charles Taylor’ and I said ‘yes I guess it was’,” she told the court, adding she never saw Taylor again and did not confront him about the gift she claims she subsequently gave to a charity.

Taylor, 62, is standing trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his alleged role in the 1991-2001 Sierra Leone civil war that claimed some 120,000 lives.

He is accused of receiving illegally mined “blood diamonds” in return for arming rebels who murdered, raped and maimed Sierra Leone civilians, cutting off their limbs and carving initials into their bodies.

Prosecutors had subpoenaed Campbell in a bid to cast doubt on Taylor’s credibility and to try to disprove his claim he never possessed rough diamonds.

She told the court she had not wanted to put her family in danger after reading on the Internet of “this man who killed thousands of people, supposedly.”

The model, dressed in a classical, beige two-piece with a knee-length skirt, wore her straightened hair swept back in a smart bun with a sparkling, choker necklace.

She told judges she gave the stones to a friend, Jeremy Ratcliffe, who worked for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund to “do something good with”.

But she claimed she spoke to Ratcliffe last year, “and he still has them”.

The charity has denied receiving such a contribution.

The British beauty told the court it was “quite normal” for her to receive gifts. “I get gifts given to me all the time, at all hours of the night.”

She claimed she was “not a diamond expert” and would not have immediately guessed that the contents of the pouch were in fact diamonds.

“I am used to seeing diamonds shiny and in a box, you know.”

She insisted she wasn’t sure who the gift came from, saying she “assumed” they were from Taylor.

The prosecution alleges the diamonds were part of a batch Taylor took to South Africa “to sell...or exchange them for weapons.”

Campbell was subpoenaed for her testimony on the basis of statements from White and Farrow – both due to testify on Monday.

But Taylor’s lawyer, Courtenay Griffiths, said the evidence was “pure speculation” and suggested it arose from a lawsuit White had brought against Campbell for breach of contract.

After a lull in media interest in Taylor’s three-year old trial, dozens of journalists from around the world descended on The Hague for Campbell’s testimony.

The model arrived and departed in secrecy, though, in line with a court order she had obtained that prevented her being photographed.

Oliver Courtney, a spokesman for the human rights NGO Global Witness, told AFP after Thursday’s testimony that “Charles Taylor was a brutal dictator; we hope that Naomi Campbell’s testimony will help bringing him to justice.”