Immediately after the death of Lady Dianawhich took place in Paris on August 31, 1997, several reports began to spread theories conspiracy theories, according to which the princess had not died due to a fatality, but rather after an attack planned down to the smallest details. A team of investigators began to look for evidence that would incontrovertibly explain the dynamics of the facts, to understand if it had really been a murder, or a simple accident. The investigations, which lasted two years, reconstructed that terrible night, but the conclusions reached by the experts have never completely convinced public opinion.
An uncomfortable character
A few hours after the crash in the Alma Tunnel, newspapers and television programs around the world began to speculate that Lady Diana had been killed by someone for whom her presence and, above all, her popularity, represented a danger. Some claimed that the princess had become an inconvenient figure and, for this reason, should be eliminated. Suspicions immediately focused on royal family British: some pointed out that Lady Di’s death would allow Charles to remarry Camilla without arousing the ire of British citizens.
This last theory is rather weak, given that Diana had obtained a divorce from her husband the year before his death. Furthermore, Charles still had to fight to have Camilla accepted at court, facing both the Queen Elizabethboth the opinion of the subjects, for whom Diana had by now become a legend. Perhaps, paradoxically, the death of the princess has created further obstacles to the union of the current King and his historic lover.
Others, however, were certain that the alleged attack against Diana had been orchestrated by the Prince Philipwho allegedly ordered MI6 to kill his ex-daughter-in-law to prevent her from marrying her fiancé Dodi. The reason for such cruelty was said to be the man’s religion, which was Muslim.
According to rumours, the scandal of a possible marriage between the mother of the future King of England and a man of Islamic faith has overwhelmed the Duke of Edinburgh. Crown British. Mohamed al-Fayed was a tenacious supporter of this hypothesis, but he never managed to prove it. He was convinced that the Windsors had ganged up against Diana, that the then Prime Minister Tony Blair was the accomplice who had authorised the contract killing and that the secret services were the material executors together with the paparazzi.
“I am deeply convinced, 99.9%, that it was not an accident,” al-Fayed told the Mirror in February 1998. “The car did not crash accidentally. There was a conspiracy. I will not rest until I have established exactly what happened.” This theory is also debatable: Diana and al Fayed they had not made their union official (at least not yet, although according to rumors they intended to do so on September 1, 1997). It could have been a simple summer fling. In truth, no one knows if Diana was really in love with Dodi, or if she was “using” him to make the Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan jealous, for some her true love.
For years, another supposition circulated, according to which, at the time of her death, Diana would have been pregnant with Dodi’s child. Another controversy that the royal family would have wanted to avoid at all costs, given that the unborn child would have been, as per tradition, of Islamic religion. The alleged pregnancy of the princess, however, has never been proven. Indeed, to be precise, Lady D.’s friend, Rosa Monckton, assured that Diana would have had her period from 15 to 20 August 1997, the days of their holiday in Greece.
Furthermore, the coroner Richard Shepherd, who was responsible for establishing the causes of the death of the princesstold the Daily Mail: “Pathologically there was no evidence that Princess Diana was pregnant”. Mohamed al-Fayed brought as evidence for his theory the fact that Diana’s body had been embalmed to hide the traces of her pregnancy. According to the official version, however, this type of measure had been carried out to preserve the body awaiting the visits of Charles and the then French president Chirac with his wife.
Victim of a settling of scores
In his autobiography “The Big Breach” (2001) former MI6 spy Richard Tomlinson even claimed that Diana and Dodi’s driver, Henry Paulwas allegedly paid by the secret services to assassinate the princess (but he also died in the accident: a “miscalculation”? A sort of suicide mission? It all seems very strange).
In 2006, the journalist Francis Gillery published the book “Lady Died”, in which he revealed that Diana had been the unwitting victim of a sort of settling of scores: Dodi, in fact, had gone with her to Paris not to spend a romantic vacation, but to conclude a shady deal. Someone would have tampered with his car in an attempt to destroy one of the pillars of the al-Fayed dynasty. Another hypothesis yet to be proven.
These are just some of the conspiracy theories about Lady Diana’s death. The most famous ones, from which other conspiracy fantasies sprang. In order to try to bring order to the affair and verify any responsibilities in the princess’s death, theOperation Paget.
Operation Paget
The kingdom and the entire world wanted to know how and why Lady Diana had died, what the exact dynamics of the facts were from the moment the princess left the Ritz Hotel to her last moment of life. London wanted to give an answer to the many doubts of public opinion, but also to understand if the ideas of Mohammed al Fayed had a concrete basis on which to work or if they were the suggestions of a desperate man, who could not accept the loss of his son. It was the Egyptian billionaire himself, explains People, who insisted that the matter be examined further.
So on January 6, 2004, People reports, the royal coroner Michael Burgess asked Sir John Stevens, head of the Metropolitan Police Service in London, to open an inquest into the death of Lady Diana and to Dodi al Fayed. “Every single aspect of the conspiracy theories…will be examined by my team and the coroner,” Stevens told the BBC in 2004. “We have to try to do everything we can to put this investigation behind us, one way or another.”
The investigations lasted almost three years, during which 14 investigators moved between London and Paris, trying to verify as many as 175 “conspiracy charges” formulated by Mohamed al-Fayed. About 300 witnesses were heard and all the material collected ended up in an 871-page report. In addition, 600 pieces of evidence were examined, as reported by the New York Times.
According to the forecasts, the BBC still recalls, theinvestigation was supposed to cost around 2 million pounds. Instead it reached 12.5 million: 4.5 million were for the coroner’s research, 8 million, instead, were spent by the Metropolitan Police Investigation. A considerable sum, which sparked a lot of controversy. For 78% of those interviewed during a BBC survey it was “a waste of money.”
Carlo’s interrogation
Among the hundreds of people that investigators interviewed as part of Operation Paget was Carlo. The then Prince of Wales was questioned by Sir John Stevens on 6 December 2005 at St. James’s Palace. The confrontation was conducted on the basis of the famous letter, dated October 1996, in which Diana had accused Charles of plotting against her to get rid of her once and for all: “My husband is planning to ‘accident’ my car, resulting in brake failure and a serious head injury…so he can get a green light to get married.”
The princess was certain that Charles wanted to marry her children’s nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke (a theory that turned out to be unfounded and which, perhaps, Diana was convinced of even after listening to the lies told by Martin Bashir to obtain the famous interview with the BBC in November 1995) and that Camilla was “nothing but a diversion.” Charles reconstructed his last years with Diana and reiterated that he knew nothing about the letter. “…Carlo was very collaborative, because he had nothing to hide”Stevens said in an interview with the Daily Mail, in 2021.
The conclusion of the investigation
The results of the investigation were published on 14 December 2006. According to the investigators there is no reason to believe that Lady Diana was the victim of a plot. The accident in the Alma Tunnel would have been caused by “grossly negligent driving”: apparently before getting into the Mercedes, Henri Paul, Diana and Dodi’s driver, would have been drunk and would have taken drugs. Furthermore, he would have driven at a crazy speed, quickly losing control of the vehicle.
The dossier denied both the possibility that the princess was pregnant at the time of the crash, and the insinuations according to which theMI6 would have spied on her calls and monitored her home. In 2022, David Douglas, a member of Operation Paget, explained on ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “It is my absolute belief that this was a terrible, tragic accident in which three people lost their lives and another saw his life turned upside down.”
Stevens also commented on the results of the investigation and, speaking to the New York Times, clarified: “Our conclusion is that, based on the evidence available at this time, there was no conspiracy to kill the occupants of the car. This was a tragic accident.” However, Stevens never placed all the blame on theaccident to Henri Paul: “An accident of this nature is similar to a collision larger than an airplane. There is a long chain of events. Remove any link in that chain and this would never have happened.”
Among these events there would be the decision of Diana and Dodi not to wear the seat belts. If they had, perhaps the story would have turned out differently. Even the coroner Richard Shepherd told the Daily Mail: “If (Diana) had worn her seat belt, she probably would have survived… Maybe she would have gotten away with a black eye, a few broken ribs, an arm in a cast…” Unfortunately, the wound she sustained left her no escape: “…It was small, but rare, one of the rarest, if not the rarest, that I have ever encountered in my career.”
William And Harryas the Independent points out, accepted the conclusions of the investigation, unlike Mohamed al-Fayed, who reiterated his accusations against the royal family on ITV’s News at Ten programme and commented: “I’ve had enough. I put myself in God’s hands to get my revenge.”
Probably, however, there is no truth to demand, no mystery to discover, nor revenge to take: Diana and Dodi would have died in a car accident that with more attention, perhaps, could have been avoided.