WAS DIANA 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?

(Source: rinf.com, Feb/06)