THE MURDER OF
PRINCESS DIANAn 1997, a year after she and Prince
Charles divorced, Princess Diana
was in the back seat of a Mercedes
S-Class sedan speeding through
the streets of Paris, tailed by pa-
parazzi. Next to her was Dodi Al-Fayed,
son of the billionaire who owned Har-
rods at the time, Mohamed Al-Fayed.
In the front were Henri Paul, a security
chief at the Ritz Paris, and Trevor Rees-
Jones, Dodi’s bodyguard. None wore a
seat belt. Paul, the driver, was drunk.
Entering an underpass tunnel at
60 mph, Paul grazed a slower-moving
white Fiat Uno and lost control. The
Mercedes slammed into a concrete
pillar head-on and split nearly in half.
Dodi and Paul were killed outright.
Rees-Jones was conscious with severe
injuries. Diana lay fatally injured on
the floor in the back. She died in a hos-
pital three and a half hours later. Her
body was embalmed that same day.
Soon after, Dodi’s bereaved father
revealed that the couple were en-
gaged and expecting a baby (a claim
that the embalming made impossible
to verify). He began asking pointed
questions: Why were there no security
videos of what happened? Why was
her body embalmed if not to hide her
pregnancy by a Muslim? And where
was the mysterious white Fiat?THE FACTS: The United Kingdom’s
Metropolitan Police Service lookedinto the matter. They found that there
was, in fact, a traffic-monitoring cam-
era mounted above the entrance to
the underpass that would have cap-
tured the collision between the two
cars. But this camera only monitored
live traffic and didn’t record the feed.
Because the traffic unit’s office closed
an hour before the accident, nobody
witnessed whatever might have been
visible on the screen.
The embalming of Diana’s body
was problematic because the fluid can
contaminate a postmortem examina-
tion’s toxicology reports. However, the
French police and the British consul-
general had authorized the hospital to
do so because Diana’s family would
be viewing the body.
And what about that white Fiat?
Authorities investigated the paint it
left on the Mercedes wreck. The color
was called Bianco Corfu and had
been used only on Fiat Uno cars man-
ufactured between 1983 and 1987. A
massive dragnet by French police ex-
amined roughly 2,000 cars with the
paint—none was a match. But even
if the British government had chosen
to kill Diana, as Dodi’s father insinu-
ated, death by Fiat Uno was a hor-
rible plan. Using a lightweight Fiat to
bump a much heavier Mercedes
S-Class is not exactly a sure-thing
assassination.
Diana’s was a tragic death but an
accidental one. Henri Paul was drunk
and driving too fast, which is precisely
what the British police found.100 may 2019
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