Death of Lady Diana
Who Killed The Princess of Wales ?
August 31, 1997 will be remembered. It is 12:25 a.m. when Lady Di's car hits the thirteenth pillar of the Alma tunnel in Paris. At 4 a.m., her death was noted. Back on a fatal gear.
Lady Di : The star of the paparazzis
This is the big deal of the summer. Divorced for just a few months, Lady Diana appears with Dodi al-Fayed, the son of the Egyptian billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed, owner of the department stores Harrods in London, and the Ritz in Paris. In July, they were in Saint-Tropez, in August, here they are on a Mediterranean cruise. Lady Diana is the most photographed woman in the world, and this luxury romance comes right on top when the news is on vacation. And then, Di and Dodi, it sounds like a musical, almost too good to be true. Princess Diana and her suitor do not flee from the paparazzi. The summer also happens in the biggest improvisation, to the chagrin of the two bodyguards in charge of the couple's security, Kes Wingfield and Trevor Rees-Jones.
The same goes for Paris, the last stop before returning to London. It is 3:20 p.m. on Saturday August 30, 1997, when the Harrods-colored Gulfstream IV lands at Le Bourget, coming from Sardinia. Here too, the photographers are there. The driver of the Mercedes sows them on the highway. The afternoon and evening will be going back and forth and procrastination. The couple first went to the former private mansion of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, near the Bois de Boulogne, which is now rented by Mohamed al-Fayed to the City of Paris. Then we deposit the luggage in the apartment that the family owns, rue Arsène-Houssaye. Lady Di and Dodi go to the Ritz around 4 p.m., leave around 7 p.m., direction rue Arsène-Houssaye, return there around 10 p.m. to dine in the imperial suite. The bodyguards are a hundred hits. For weeks, Dodi has been hiding its projects from them, they cannot anticipate anything, plan any itinerary. Trevor Rees-Jones discovers the new destination when he is already behind the wheel of the escort car.
In front of the hotel, Trevor rushes to open the door of the Mercedes at the back of which the couple has taken their place. Nobody goes out. When Dodi finally decides, too late, the car is surrounded. There are cameras everywhere, and a crowd of several hundred people blocks the entrance. The few meters separating Princess Diana and the billionaire's son from the Ritz's revolving door turn to the Stations of the Cross. Kes Wingfield is on the verge of explosion.
The tension has gone up a notch. It is 11:07 p.m. Kes and Trevor are on guard outside the door of the Imperial Suite. They ignore that inside Dodi has already called to ask Henri Paul, the deputy security manager, to position a third car, another Mercedes, opposite the service entrance. Without speaking to his bodyguards, Dodi decided that Henri Paul would drive the “big discount car” in which he and Lady Diana would be engulfed, while Trevor and Kes would take the wheel of the first two vehicles, located in front the Ritz, hoping to create a diversion. Informed, Trevor refuses net. "It was a dreadful device," he said. Henri Paul was a security man, not a driver. They needed a convoy of two cars and a bodyguard. ” But impossible to get Dodi back on his plan. All Trevor gets is to take a seat in the Mercedes driven by Henri Paul. Kes and a driver will take care of the other two cars.
When the bodyguard, Henri Paul, Lady Diana and Dodi leave the Ritz by a door overlooking rue Cambon, two or three photographers are there. The element of surprise is missed. No matter, it is 0h20, the Mercedes starts at full speed. It will only be caught at a red light, place de la Concorde, by photographers with motorcycles. Henri Paul burns fire and sows them. At 12:25 a.m., the Samu received an emergency call, there was an accident under the Alma bridge tunnel. Contrary to the first statements, no photographer was with the car at the time when it lost control. They arrived later, saw nothing of the circumstances.
Fatal accident in the Alma tunnel
The report is terrible. At the front, the driver died instantly and Trevor appeared in agony, the victim of very serious facial injuries. In the back, Dodi too is dead, but Princess Diana is still breathing. The first dispatches report injuries to the leg. In fact, Lady Diana was hit in the chest, victim of an internal hemorrhage. The ambulance which takes her to La Salpêtrière has to make several stops in an attempt to stabilize her condition. In the operating room, the surgical team tries the impossible. In vain. “Despite the closure of the wound and a two-hour external and internal heart massage, we were unable to restore circulatory efficiency,” said doctor Bruno Riou in the press release from the Assistance Publique. The Princess of Wales died at 4 a.m. ” Very far away, in Scotland, in Balmoral, an upset father went to wake up his sons.
At the very moment when Lady Di's death was made public, voices were raised in Egypt, the country of origin of the Al-Fayed, to cry out for the assassination. Reason? The mother of the future king of England was going to marry a Muslim and the British establishment could not admit it. Problem, whatever Mohamed al-Fayed said, his son and the Princess of Wales were not going to get married. She appeared with Dodi to enrage the Windsor and especially to arouse the jealousy of another Muslim, Doctor Hasnat Khan, whom she loved and who had just broken up with her.
The billionaire owner of Harrods and the Ritz, after trying to blame the accident on the photographers, whose innocence will ultimately be proven, also screams at the conspiracy guided by the royal family.
The motive remains the same. We add a presumed pregnancy that the forensic examination has however excluded. It will take ten years of rumors, three years of investigation by the British police, a public judicial inquiry to be right for the relentlessness of Mohamed al-Fayed. It must be said that as owner of the Ritz and employer of the driver of the car, he can be held criminally responsible for the accident and sentenced to damages amounting to millions of euros.
Princess Diana murdered ?
The Al-Fayed clan is not alone in believing in the possibility of an assassination, however. Lady Diana herself, as evidenced by a letter made public by her ex-butler, Paul Burrell, seemed to fear a masked car crash. Only, this letter without header or date corresponds to an analytical work carried out by Princess Diana to put words on her terrors.
Nicholas Davies, ex-officer, ex-war correspondent, specialist in the royal family, has written two books on the death of Lady Di and clearly speaks of assassination by the British secret services. This time, however, the mobile would be more political. The Princess of Wales, by her aura, had managed to put an end to the use of anti-personnel mines and, according to Davies, she was preparing to support the Palestinian cause, out of control, at the risk of creating tension and imbalances. MI5 would have acted without orders. Which seems unlikely. Even if it is true that gray areas remain: the Alma surveillance camera turned towards the wall and not towards traffic, the white Fiat hit by the Mercedes which has never been found ... De what to feed until the end of time conspiracy theorists, sincere or interested.
