The World's Deadliest Diamond Heist

Almost unnoticed in the rich world, a trial for Crimes Against Humanity is taking place in the Hague. From a shiny modern courthouse, a medieval story is emerging -- one where the poorest people in the world were invaded, raped and mutilated, just to seize some shiny stones for the richest people in the world to wear. The evidence and testimony at the trial of the former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor over the past few months has stretched beyond the court's tight remit to determine his own personal cruelty. Instead, the witnesses are finally revealing the inside story of the biggest diamond heist in history -- one that killed 75,000 innocent people, crippled an entire country, and left a trail of blood that runs right to your local jewelery store.

This story begins and ends with diamonds. Sierra Leone is a tiny West African country blessed with four-and-a-half million people and cursed with hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of diamonds. As soon as the glistening chunks of carbon were discovered by the British imperial occupiers in the 1930s, they became a locus of conflict as the desperate locals swarmed with picks and hammers to chip away their own fraction of the fortune. By the 1950s, De Beers -- who had been granted exclusive rights to exploit the diamonds by the British -- were paying private companies to litter the country with landmines to keep the natives out.

But it was in the early 1990s that the most ambitious -- and apocalyptic -- plan to grab the diamonds was hatched. A man called Foday Sankoh was at its center. He had once been a soldier in the Sierra Leonean army, but he was by then biding his time as a television cameraman. With several of his Liberian friends -- including Sam Bockarie, a hairdresser and nightclub dancer -- he decided to launch a wildly ambitious, wildly violent attempt to seize Sierra Leone's diamond fields and run them as a private criminal empire. He scrambled around for support from a string of dictators: Libya's Muammar Gaddafi provided training, while Liberia's Taylor provided arms and some of his own battalions.

With this, Sankoh raised a private militia, giving it the grand-sounding name of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). He clothed it with the bare minimum of revolutionary rhetoric, plagiarizing a few phrases from Mao. This was enough to begin recruiting men from the ghettos of West Africa, promising them a job, food and "liberation". He decided to recruit children: a nine-year old with an AK47 was more use to him than a 40-year-old.

Everything was now in place to mount a "rebellion" -- a de facto invasion -- in eastern Sierra Leone, where the diamonds waited. The RUF's policy was simple, and summarized in the name that Sankoh gave to one of his military maneuvers: Operation Kill Everything. The aim was to impose maximum terror on the civilian population immediately, to drive them out and make sure nobody ever tried to come back.

They soon developed a trademark tactic: they would chop off the hands of any civilian they stumbled across. Helen K was a typical young woman found by Human Rights Watch in the RUF's wake. She explained she had lost her two children after an RUF attack and had no idea where they were. "They captured me and said to lie on the floor," she said. "I was reluctant; they cut me on the neck with a machete. I was cut by a small boy. Then they put my hand on a stone and cut [it off] … I had to bury my own hand."

The child soldiers were hyped-up with drugs before being sent out to slay. Douglas Farah's account of the war, Blood from Stones, says: "One thing the children do remember vividly is the preparation for what they called 'mayhem days,' sprees of killing and raping that lasted until the participants collapsed from exhaustion. They said they were given colored pills, most likely amphetamines, and razor blade slits near their temples, where cocaine was put directly into their bloodstreams. The ensuing days were a blur."