A 709 carat uncut diamond discovered in March 2017 by a group of miners in Sierra Leone fetched $6.5m at a New York auction on Monday (December 4, 2017).
The stone was found by one pastor Emmanuel Momoh in Koryardu, located in the country’s eastern Kono district. It was the biggest diamond in the country’s history and the 14th largest ever found in the world.
In an interview with the BBC, the pastor defended the decision to handover the diamond to the government instead of selling it to middlemen. According to him, the community stands to lose if the middlemen were involved.
“We lack a lot of things. We don’t have a good road network, we don’t have better schools, or drinking water,” Momoh said. The auction was managed by Rapaport Group, a network of diamond companies.