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Sunday, February 23, 2014
by Yahoo! New
Freetown (AFP) - Sierra Leone
said on Saturday it had discovered a diamond worth $6.2 million,
declaring it one of the most precious finds of the past decade.
The
stone, dug up last week in the eastern district of Kono, was measured
at 153 carats, making it significantly bigger than the largest find of
2013, a 125-carat diamond unearthed in the same area, the state-run
National Minerals Agency said.
"This
153.44-carat diamond is one of the finest diamonds to be found in
Sierra Leone in the last 10 years," the agency said in a statement.
It
was graded as D+ on the D-to-Z diamond colour scale, meaning that it
has almost no yellow tint caused by nitrogen impurities, and the agency
said it "could only be matched or surpassed by fancy diamonds such as
blue or pink in terms of price".
"The diamond is a cleavage in terms of shape and the clarity is of very high quality," the statement added.
"In
other words, this is a premium stone as a result of its colour and
clarity, and had it been an octahedron-shaped stone, it could have
almost doubled the price of $6 million."
Sierra
Leone remains one of the world's poorest countries after a brutal
11-year civil war which ended in 2002 -- a conflict that left the world
with images of feared rebel leaders armed from the sale of "blood
diamonds" recruiting drugged-up child soldiers and hacking the limbs off
thousands of civilians.
But
the country's mineral riches -- which include gold, bauxite, titanium
ore and magnetite iron-ore, as well as diamonds -- have attracted
massive investments.
Small-scale
artisanal mining has sustained the country's eastern region since
diamonds were discovered in 1930, and it was here that the 968.9-carat
Star of Sierra Leone -- the largest alluvial diamond ever found -- was
mined in 1972.
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