Diana was murdered

COULD it be that we’ve all been fooled? That there was no ‘accident’ on the night of 31 August 1997, in a dark tunnel in Paris. That Diana, Princess of Wales, was correct in her fears of an assassination.

That she was pregnant with Dodi Al Fayed’s child, and planning to disgrace the monarchy by marrying into the Muslim religion. And that the entire world has been craftily blinded to the biggest cover-up of the 20th century. Could it be that Diana really was murdered?

The theories can no longer be easily dismissed.

The official inquiry into Princess Diana’s death has recently admitted that this
was not just a simple, tragic car crash. According to Lord Stevens, the former
London Metropolitan Police Commissioner in charge of the investigation, “it is a
far more complex inquiry” than that.

Perhaps even more surprising, Stevens went on to vindicate Dodi’s father,
Mohamed, who was at the forefront of the campaign for the inquiry to be
established and has been ridiculed for his beliefs that the British secret
service killed Diana. “It is right to say that some of the issues that have been
raised by Mr Fayed have been right to be raised, ” said Stevens.

The issues raised by Al Fayed . . . every one of them . . .are explosive. He
believes that Diana was pregnant, that she was engaged to marry Dodi, that the
MI6 plotted her death and that the paparazzi’s involvement was used a
smokescreen to cover up the assassination.

If Stevens has evidence to prove even one of these issues, history must surely
be rewritten.

This was no slip of the tongue. Stevens is a notoriously discreet individual. He
chose his words carefully. According to sources close to the investigation, he
was making a deliberate attempt to prepare the public for some very shocking
conclusions. So which of the allegations and theories and hypotheses could
possibly be true?

The questions begin the day before the crash.

Reports suggest that Dodi Al Fayed slipped out of the Ritz hotel in Paris to
collect a £130,000 ring from a jewellers, which Diana had chosen from its sister
shop in Monte Carlo. Fayed’s cousin, Hussein Yassin, says that Dodi later told
him that “we are very serious, we are going to get married”.

Three years after the couple’s death, Diana’s priest, Fr Frank Gelli, also
stepped forward. He said that Diana had quizzed him repeatedly about the
possibility of a mixedreligion marriage, and asked him if he would perform the
service when she married. A few days before she died, she phoned him to say she
had good news which she would reveal when she got home.

Mohamed Al Fayed is insistent that the couple were preparing to announce their
engagement, and that the British monarchy would stop at nothing to prevent this
happening. Friends of Diana refute these claims.

On the night of 30 August, Dodi and Diana dined in the Ritz hotel, before
leaving for Dodi’s apartment. It is not certain how Henri Paul, the deputy chief
of security at the hotel, came to drive the car.

He did not normally act as a chauffeur, and was not scheduled to work that
evening.

Many reports suggest that he did not even hold a chauffeur’s license. He appears
to have been a lastminute choice of driver.

French police now say it was Dodi’s bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones . . . the only
survivor of the accident . . . who decided to make the switch.

Paul’s impromptu role as chauffeur is the first of many questions surrounding
his involvement in the case.

Blood tests would later suggest that he was wellover the legal alcohol limit to
drive, and that he had high levels of carbon monoxide in his system.

The cocktail of substances found in his blood were so potent as to prompt a
senior figure in a major Paris hospital to question the authenticity of the
samples.

“I don’t see how he could walk in that state, much less take the wheel, ” he
said.

The evidence was also questioned by Anthony Scrivener, one of Britain’s best
known QCs, who concluded that “the near lethal dose of carbon monoxide in his
blood could not be explained. If the samples were accurate, Paul would have been
unable to stand up, his balance would have been way off, and he would have been
doubled over in pain from a severe headache in his temple.”

But walk Paul did. The last images of his life, captured on the hotel video,
show him walking steadily down the corridor, talking with Dodi’s security
guards, waiting at the back entrance for the Mercedes S-280 to arrive, and then
pulling away from the curb at a normal speed before driving down the Rue Cambon.

The time was 12.20am on Sunday morning. Trevor Rees-Jones . . . the only
occupant of the car wearing a seat belt . . . sat in the passenger seat beside
Henri Paul. Diana sat directly behind Rees-Jones, with Dodi beside her. Though
reports vary, the general consensus is that 10 photographers, three of whom were
riding motorbikes, were soon in hot pursuit of Diana’s car.

The most direct way to Dodi’s apartment was via the Avenue de Champs-Elysees.

For some reason, Paul did not take this route. Reports suggest he was trying to
lose the photographers in the backstreets of the city, but according to one
eyewitness, Thierry H, “a pursuing paparazzi motorist” was blocking the last
exit off the expressway.

There was nowhere to go except the Alma tunnel.

MI6 invovlement?

According to former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson, the tunnel was the ideal
location for a covert assassination. In 1999, Tomlinson made a statement to the
French police stating his belief that the British secret intelligence service
held documents that “would yield important new evidence intof the death of the
Princess of Wales”.

During his time with MI6, Tomlinson said he was shown documents by a fellow
officer, Dr Nicholas Bernard Frank Fishwick, which outlined a plan to kill
Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. “Dr Fishwick proposed to arrange the crash in
a tunnel, because the proximity of concrete close to the road would ensure that
the crash would be sufficiently violent to cause death, and reduce the
possibility that there might be independent casual witnesses, ” said Tomlinson.

“Dr Fishwick suggested that one way to cause the crash might be to disorientate
the chauffeur using a strobe flash gun device. In short, this scenario bore
remarkable similarities to the circumstances that killed the Princess of Wales.”

Tomlinson also reported documents which contained information from an MI6
informant who worked as a security officer in the Paris Ritz Hotel. He says he
now firmly believes that the informant was Henri Paul.

This would go some way towards explaining the £120,000 found in several of
Paul’s bank accounts following the crash. He earned £23,000 a year in his job at
the Ritz.

Finally, Tomlinson said, the arrival of two experienced MI6 agents to Paris in
the weeks before Diana’s death cannot be ignored. At the end of his statement,
Tomlinson writes of numerous detailed incidents of harassment and intimidation
which he says were intended to prevent him from speaking out. “The lengths which
MI6, the CIA and the DST have taken to deter me giving this evidence suggests
that they have something to hide, ” he said.

The tunnel loomed ahead as the black Mercedes sped through in the centre of
Paris. Eye-witnesses gave varying accounts about what happened next. However, it
is generally agreed that a white Fiat Uno and at least one motorcycle (which
carried two riders, according to some reports) travelled very close to the
Mercedes at the time of the crash.

Disappearing witnesses Brian Anderson, a Californian businessman travelling by
taxi, saw one motorcycle trying to get in front of the car. Brenda Wells, a
British secretary, was forced off the road near the tunnel by a motorbike
carrying two men. After giving her statement to police, Wells disappeared from
her flat in Champigny sur Marne. It subsequently transpired that she and her
husband had been told to go into hiding and not speak to anyone about what she
had seen. She has not spoken publicly since her initial statement.

Various reports say that the electricity had been cut in the tunnel some 25
minutes before the crash.

This has been offered as an explanation for why the cameras in the tunnel did
not record the accident. It does not explain why not one of the 17 surveillance
cameras between the hotel and the tunnel were switched on that night.

Some witnesses claim the tunnel was completely dark as the lights were still off
at the time of the crash.

Frenchman Francois Levistre was driving just ahead of the speeding Mercedes and
claims to have seen a “big flash” just before the crash.

Newspaper articles this week reported that Lord Stevens’ inquiry is now
investigating claims of “new witnesses” who said “they saw a motorcyclist point
a laser into the eyes of chauffeur Henri Paul”.

The role of the white Fiat Uno is also questionable.

Detectives found white paint marks on the crumpled Mercedes after the crash, and
shards of red break-light glass were found on the ground, even though the
Mercedes break lights were intact.

The owner of the Fiat, James Andanson, was found dead in his burned-out car in
the year 2000. Initially, police believed he had killed himself, but a French
fireman, Christophe Pelat, who attended the burning wreck of the car, says he
appeared to have a bullet hole in his skull. Pelat has since declined to comment
on whether he has been interviewed by Stevens’ detectives. Several weeks after
Andanson’s death, there were reports of an assault on the agency where he
worked. Staff were held hostage by armed men, who then escaped with photos and
equipment.

For whatever reason, Henri Paul lost control of the car. He veered to the left,
crashed into the wall, and was catapulted to the right, where the car finally
collided with the 13th pillar of the tunnel. As the car finally came to a halt,
Henri Paul collapsed against the horn, explaining some witness accounts of a car
horn blaring in the minutes after the crash.

The first witnesses at the scene reported seeing someone jumping away from the
car. There is speculation that this is the same person who moved Paul off the
horn.

There is also speculation that this person was injecting Paul’s body with the
drugs later found in his blood.

An ambulance arrived and . . . controversially . . . took over 40 minutes to
transfer Diana the four miles to the hospital, passing by two other hospitals on
the way. At 4am, the Princess of Wales was pronounced dead.

A French pathologist, Prof Dominique Lecomte, embalmed Diana’s body before a
proper postmortem exam could be carried out.

The process meant vital toxicological evidence was destroyed, making it
impossible to tell if Diana was, in fact, expecting a child. Lecomte has refused
to explain her actions. None of the other victims were embalmed.

During the night, it has also been reported that MI6 agents visited the morgue,
and it was at this point that Henri Paul’s blood samples were tampered with, or
switched. The Lord Stevens’ inquiry has interviewed MI6 agents as part of the
investigation.

It is as yet unclear whether the inquiry will be taking into account the letter
that Diana wrote to her butler, Paul Burrell, 10 months before her death.

“This particular phase in my life is most dangerous, ” she wrote. “[Name
obscured] is planning an accident in my car, brake failure and serious head
injury.”

It appears that Diana may have feared what no one else suspected. Were her
suspicions realised on that night? Was Diana really murdered? We await Lord
Stevens for the final truth.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Why did French police open the tunnel to traf”c shortly after the accident,
allowing potentially important evidence to be lost?

Why did it take over 40 minutes for the ambulance to transfer Diana to the
hospital, which was only four miles away?

>> Was Henri Paul working for MI6?

How did large sums of money come to be in several of Paul’s bank accounts?

>> If Henri Paul was obviously drunk or drugged, why did Trevor Rees-Jones . . .
the man charged with looking after Diana . . . not prevent him from driving?

>> Why did the French government refuse to supply a sample of Paul’s blood for
independent testing?

>> Who was the mystery “gure seen leaping away from the car immediately after
the crash?

>> Why was Diana’s body embalmed before a postmortem could take place?

>> Was Diana pregnant?

>> Were Diana and Dodi engaged?

Why was there not a single frame of CCTV footage along the entire route from the
Ritz to the Alma underpass?

>> Why won’t the US and British intelligence services reveal the information
they are known to have on the couple?

Sarah McInerney
Sunday Tribune