Police divers are searching for one of the first African women to attain stardom as a supermodel amid fears that she fell into the Seine in Paris after a heavy drinking session.

Katoucha Niane, 47, from Guinea, disappeared more than a week ago as she returned to her houseboat moored near the Alexander III bridge in central Paris late at night after a party.

Friends reported her missing four days later and the hunt began for the former model who was the face of Yves Saint Laurent, the French haute couture guru, in the 1980s before stepping off the catwalk to launch a campaign against female genital mutilation. “We have dived into the river several times to look for her and are continuing to do so,” said a Paris police spokesman yesterday.

When her handbag was discovered by the front door to her boat there was initial speculation that the woman dubbed the French-speaking Naomi Campbell could have committed suicide. Detectives believe it more likely that the mother of three lost her footing and slipped into the river accidentally. There was no sign of a break-in or violence at her home where she lived alone when she was in Paris. “That night, it was raining, it was windy and the currents were strong,” said an officer.

Katoucha, as she is known in the fashion world, first earned fame as a model for Thierry Mugler, Paco Rabanne and Christian Lacroix, the designers. It was Yves Saint Laurent who turned her into a global icon nicknamed the Peul Princess after the Peul ethnic group of Guinea and eight other West African states.

“He loved her enormously,” said Dominique Deroche, head of PR at the fashion house. “She was exactly like an Yves Saint Laurent drawing, a proud head on a long neck, very slim but with strong shoulders, made for haute couture. She looked magnificent on the catwalk and often wore very powerful outfits like a Cubist navy-blue dress with doves around the neckline.”

Katcoucha, the daughter of Djibril Tamsir Niane, a writer and historian, said in her autobiography, In My Flesh, that her early years were an idyllic time surrounded by hibiscus and ylang-ylang flowers in Conakry, the Guinean capital.

Innocence came to a brutal end when she underwent excision, aged 9. “My mother said we were going to the cinema. And I found myself the victim of a horror movie,” she wrote. The genital mutilation she suffered was “an unimaginable trauma” that she sought to overcome through modelling.

In 1994 she stopped work as a model to launch Katoucha pour la Lutte contre l'Excision (Katoucha for the Fight against Excision), an association that fights the practice in West Africa. Friends said that she travelled from village to village in Senegal, where her children live, to talk about the dangers.

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