On August 31, 1997, at around 00:20, the Mercedes-Benz carrying Lady Diana and Dodi Al Fayed crashed into the thirteenth pillar of the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris. The driver of the car, Henri Paul, was killed instantly, as was Dodi Al-Fayed. Princess Diana was seriously injured. When first responders arrived, she was not bleeding. "But she was almost unconscious and had difficulty breathing," doctor Frederic Mailliez, who was the first to arrive at the scene of the accident, recalled in the Daily Mail. So my goal was to help him breathe easier. It was quite a difficult situation. I was alone, I had little equipment. She seemed to be fine within minutes of my arrival, but the accident had been very violent and you always expect serious internal injuries in this type of situation."
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A few minutes later, however, Lady Diana's heart stops beating, then starts again. Transported to the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, Diana finally passed away around 2:30 a.m. His bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was seriously injured and the only survivor. The story could have ended there, but no. On the contrary, it has given rise to more than one conspiracy theory. The opportunity to take stock of the wildest rumours surrounding the death of the Princess of Hearts.
The royal family ordered his assassination
As early as 1998, the Egyptian businessman Mohammed Al-Fayed claimed that Diana Spencer and her lover Dodi had been murdered by the British secret services. The mastermind of the murder is believed to be none other than the royal family. The latter "could not accept that an Egyptian Muslim should become the father-in-law of the future king of England," namely Prince William, the billionaire said. According to him, his son had just bought an engagement ring from a Parisian jeweler, and the couple intended to announce the news. Cherry on the cake, Diana was pregnant. MI6, which had wiretapped the couple, reportedly informed Queen Elizabeth II.
To be believed, the businessman exploits the slightest clue. It relies in particular on the testimony of a former MI6 agent, Richard Tommlinson, who questions Her Majesty's services. Mohammed Al-Fayed even constructs several hypotheses: Henri Paul, the head of security at the Ritz, was a spy, large sums of money would have been paid into his accounts; The driver's blood tests were performed on another person. The princess's body was embalmed to hide her pregnancy, MI6 could have blinded the driver with a powerful flash, as claimed in 2007 by the tabloid The Daily Express. A white Fiat Uno would also have forced the Mercedes into the tunnel and caused the accident... A theory that would be swept away by the conclusions of a Scotland Yard investigation in 2008.
Read also"Without me, Dodi would still be alive": the confession of Mohamed Al-Fayed who has always blamed himself for the death of his son and Lady Di
Victim of an attack
Another rumor emerged after Diana's death that the princess had been the collateral victim of an ambush. This is in any case what the author and director Francis Gillery argues in his book Lady Died and the documentary Diana and the Ghosts of the Alma, broadcast on France 3. According to him, Diana did not come to Paris for a romantic getaway with Dodi Al-Fayed but for him to sign a mysterious contract that turned out to be a trap, aimed at weakening her father. The car's electronics would have been tampered with in such a way as to cause an accident from a distance.
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Killed in ambulance
As we can read in Sud Ouest, in 2012, the American tabloid Globe claimed to have evidence and testimonies according to which Princess Diana was executed in the ambulance that transported her to the hospital. The media outlet then says it is relying on information from a private investigator...
Lady Di is still alive
What if this accident had only been a strategy to disappear from the radar? This is what some people claim: yes, Lady Di is still alive and she has been living peacefully with her companion for days, far from the paparazzi who made her daily life unbearable. Prince Harry himself recently confessed to having believed in this theory for a long time. "Her life was very sad, she had been chased and harassed, lies had been spread about her, she had been lied to," he wrote in his memoir The Deputy. So I thought maybe she had staged this accident, in order to create a diversion and escape." The denial of a son who does not accept the death of his mother.
Two Investigations
It took two investigations to extinguish all the fuzzy theories about Diana Spencer's death: one, a French one, conducted by the criminal squad after the accident; the other, British, opened in 2004 on allegations of a "cover-up" of an assassination and "conspiracy" of MI6 agents on the orders of the royal family. They came to the same conclusion: Lady Diana succumbed to her injuries caused by the accident under the Alma Bridge. "The reality would have been easier to demonstrate, but conspiracy theories have the advantage of making people dream," Jean-Michel Carradec'h, a veteran reporter and author of Who Killed Lady Di? (1). While the mystery has been cleared up, the only thing left is that Diana's death continues to fascinate us over and over again. It is also at the heart of the new season of The Crown. A whirlwind of emotions to discover on Netflix from this Thursday, November 16.
(1) Who Killed Lady Di?, by Jean-Michel Carradec'h, ed. Grasset, 248 p., April 2017.