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How Diana died: facts and fiction

Hasan Suroor

— PHOTO: AP

A December 11, 1995 photograph of Princess Diana.

WILL THEY or won't they? Will they finally let go of the lurid conspiracy theories and accept with good grace that Princess Diana's death in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997, was simply a tragic accident and not engineered by shadowy secret agents paid by someone, somewhere to bump her off so that the British royal family could sleep easy?

The chances are that conspiracy theorists will continue to flog their allegations — after all some have made big bucks peddling them through books and documentaries — but officially the curtain will come down on the so-called "Diana murder case" this week as a high-power inquiry led by John Stevens, a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, is set to confirm that her death was an accident caused by a drunken driver as established by a French investigation in 1999.

The inquiry was set up three years ago to settle, once and for all, the controversy surrounding the crash, which, it has been alleged, was deliberately caused to "eliminate" Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, son of the Harrods' owner Mohammed Fayed, because she was seen as an "embarrassment" by the royal family.

Lord Stevens will release his findings on Thursday but, thanks to a series of media leaks over the weekend, anyone who has even casually followed the news knows what to expect. And on Sunday the BBC chipped in with an in-depth investigative documentary, How Diana Died: The Conspiracy Files, corroborating Lord Stevens' reported conclusions.

According to the leaked portions of the voluminous Stevens report, independently supported by the BBC investigation, there is no basis either for the theory that the crash was "set up" or that there was any attempt to "hush up" things after the accident. The crash, it is stated, was down to just one fact: the driver, Henri Paul, was drunk (more than three times the permissible limit) because of which he lost control of the Mercedes after entering the Alma Tunnel and hitting another car. The fact that the car was being chased by photographers may have contributed to overspeeding but the main cause of the accident was drunk driving.

Martine Monteil, head of the French Judicial Police who investigated the crash, told the BBC programme: "There was a horde of photographers who were following the couple and they were very close to the Mercedes when the accident happened. Obviously this causes annoyance and stress. But it is not the only explanation. The driver also lost control of the car, that's obvious."

The allegation that Paul's blood samples were swapped after the accident to portray him as a drunk to cover up an alleged secret service plot to kill Diana is also rejected. New samples of his blood matched with his parents' DNA show that the original post-mortem samples were "accurate and were his," the BBC said; a "fact" which the Stevens inquiry is also believed to have established, though it is reportedly critical of the way the original blood samples were handled by French authorities.

The two investigations also demolish what is perhaps the most sensational of all conspiracy theories — namely Mr. Fayed's claim that Diana was pregnant with Dodi's child at the time and that they were going to marry. His theory is: they were "eliminated" because the royal family could not contemplate the idea of the mother of the future kings of England (Williams and Harry) marrying a Muslim and giving birth to a "half-Muslim" child, as one conspiracy theorist put it in the BBC documentary.

On the basis of new forensic tests of Diana's blood samples, the Stevens inquiry is reported to have concluded that she was not pregnant. Rosa Monckton, one of Diana's closest friends, told both the BBC and the Stevens team that the Princess was not pregnant and that she had no plans to marry Dodi. A ring that Dodi bought for her was not an engagement ring, she said.

"I know there is a ring... she said it's going very firmly on my right hand. So no, she wasn't contemplating marriage with him," Ms. Monckton has said.

Professor Andre Lienhart, a member of the French medical team that investigated the case, told the BBC documentary that he had seen copies of the report of the post-mortem examination carried out on Diana in Britain 24 hours after her death and "she was not pregnant." Other fantasies that the Stevens inquiry is said to have "systematically demolished" include accusations of a collusion between British, French, and American secret services all of which supposedly had their own interest in getting her out of the way; allegations of a "deliberate" delay in taking Diana to the hospital after the accident; and "lapses" in the French police investigations amounting to a "cover-up."

The inquiry, which took nearly three years to complete, has cost the exchequer some £2 million. Yet, there are plenty of Britons who refuse to believe that an "extraordinary" person such as Diana could have died such an "ordinary" death. According to a BBC poll, more than three in 10 persons in the U.K. do not believe it was an accident. And those with a commercial interest in perpetuating the myths about her death insist that she was "taken out."

So, come Thursday and the conspiracy theorists will be at it again.

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