Diana Thought She Would be killed over Campaign against Landmines

Telegraph - Diana 'believed she would be bumped off'

Diana, Princess of Wales believed she was going to be "bumped off" by MI6 because of her high profile campaign against landmines, the inquest into her death has been told.

Previous posts about the inquest can be seen here.

Photographer Was Told Diana Was to Announce Engagement or Pregnancy

Daily Express - GET TO RITZ FAST...DIANA ANNOUNCING PREGNANCY

PAPARAZZI photographers had been told to expect Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed to announce their engagement or a pregnancy on the night they died, the inquest heard yesterday.

Thierry Orban, a photo-reporter with the Sygma photo agency, told the police his duty chief editor Guillaume Vall­abreque had phoned him at home between 9pm and 9.30pm to ask him to go the Ritz Hotel specifically because news was expected.

“He told me that there was a rumour of an announcement that Diana was getting married or having a baby and he asked me to go to the Ritz to take a few photos of Diana with Dodi Al Fayed,” he said in a statement read to the jury.

Mr Orban, however, said he initially refused because he was having dinner at home with friends.

He was called again at around 11pm by his colleague Jacques Langevin, who asked him to take over from him outside the Ritz, but he again refused.

Around two hours later, he was told there had been a crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. He went there and found Mr Langevin and other paparazzi near the wreckage of Diana and Dodi’s Mercedes.

He said he stayed at the scene until a police van carrying a group of photographers and an ambulance taking the stricken Princess to hospital left the tunnel.

Mr Orban, 52, followed the ambulance, taking a photograph when it stopped just a short distance from the Pitie Salpetriere Hospital, where Diana eventually died.

“The ambulance stopped, the driver got out and got into the back. That was when I took the only photograph of the ambulance, which in any case was blurry,” he said.

“It was rocking as if they were doing a cardiac massage.”

“Then the ambulance carried on to the Pitie Salpetriere Hospital. From there, I turned back.”

The inquest jury also heard parts of a statement made by hire car chauffeur Eric Li-Falandry, who was driving past the tunnel shortly after the crash and stopped to help.

He told the police he approached the car and saw people tending to the front seat passenger, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones – now known as Trevor Rees – and a woman passenger in the back, although he did not realise at the time that the woman was Princess Diana

Mr Li-Falandry, 47, described the moment Diana opened her eyes.

“I looked in the back of the car and saw a woman sitting on the floor with her back against the rear right-hand door as someone attended to her,” he said.

“I noticed her open her eyes. I said to myself that she was alive and therefore went on to the driver.

“I saw his white hand and knew that he was dead. I could not see his face.

“As I was about to help the person tending to the woman, I noticed the police arrive. Not wanting to hinder the emergency services and, upset by what I had just seen, I decided to return to my vehicle. It was only later, on listening to the radio, that I found out that it was the Princess.”

A British solicitor told crash investigators he saw two cars he believed were fleeing the area around the Alma tunnel at high speed about the time of the crash.

Extracts from statements made by Gary Hunter, now dead, were read to the jury yesterday.

He said he saw a small black car followed by a larger white car travel beneath his hotel window.

British police officers suggested the two cars could have had nothing to do with the crash because, if they had emerged from the tunnel and followed the proper traffic signals, they would have had to travel one-and-a-half miles, to get to the position where Mr Hunter saw them, in around one minute.

However, Michael Mansfield QC, for Dodi’s father Mohamed Al Fayed, asked whether the Scotland Yard team working for former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens had investigated if the cars could have come from the slip road beside the tunnel.

The court was told the Scotland Yard team, which spent £3.69million of taxpayers’ money investigating conspiracy theories around the crash, had not. The police agreed to look into it yesterday.

The inquest continues.

Other posts about the inquest can be seen here.

Witness at Diana Inquest: I Saw a Flash

Daily Express - ANOTHER WITNESS: I SAW BLINDING FLASHES

AN American businessman who was in a taxi overtaken by Princess Diana’s Mercedes described last night seeing a “significant flash of light” a second before the crash.

Brian Anderson said he saw the Mercedes being pursued by at least three motorcycles a few hundred yards before it reached the Alma tunnel.

And then suddenly, after they disappeared from view, there was a “pretty significant flash of light”. He said the light appeared to come from towards the front and left of his car – perhaps from boats on the River Seine – as it sped along the riverside expressway.

“I saw the flash of light, which again didn’t strike me at the time because it’s where the illumination of the boats takes place, but a pretty significant flash of light,” he said.

Asked whether it had come from the boats on the Seine, he replied: “Yes, it came from that vicinity.”

A second later, he heard what sounded like an explosion. Describing the sequence, he said: “Flash. Explosion. Audio noise. It was a very large noise that sounded like an explosion. There was a half second between them.”

Mr Anderson, 53, who was giving evidence by video link from California, told the inquest his car stopped between 40 and 100 yards from the tunnel entrance.

“We came to a rapid stop and I saw an object passing in front of us and into the right side of the tunnel. It was the black Mercedes,” he said.

Seconds earlier, he had seen the Mercedes driving rapidly in the left lane of the carriageway down the expressway with three motorbikes just behind. In a statement to police, he said: “The bikes were in a cluster, like a swarm, around the Mercedes.” One of the motorcycles had two riders and the others had just one, he told the hearing.

Driving past the wreckage, Mr Anderson said he thought he saw one of the motorbikes parked in front of the mangled Mercedes.

On Monday, Francois Levistre told the hearing he had seen a bright flash of light in the tunnel.

Mr Anderson was interviewed by Scotland Yard officers between 2004 and 2006. He said he had also given an interview to French police but they claimed they had never spoken to him.

Ian Burnett, QC, for the coroner, said that Mr Anderson had given differing accounts of what he saw in five interviews with US media organisations in 10 years. He had not previously mentioned seeing a bright flash of light from the river and he had described seeing only two motorcycles.

Asked why his accounts varied, Mr Anderson, an international management consultant, said that thinking about what he had seen over the years had triggered further memories.

Other posts about the inquest can be seen here.

Diana Crash Witness Statements

Daily Mail - Diana witness had to swerve to avoid slow moving 'light-coloured' car seconds before the crash

A driver has told how he was forced to avoid a 'light-coloured' car driving 'extremely slowly' into the Alma tunnel just seconds before the crash which claimed Princess Diana's life.

David Laurent claimed the car, possibly a Fiat Uno, was travelling at little more than 18mph, forcing him to pull at speed into another lane.The limit in the underpass is 31mph.

Other posts about the inquest can be seen here.

Richard Tomlinson to Make Statements at Diana Inquest

Daily Express - DRIVER 'MET MI6 SPY' ON CRASH NIGHT

Renegade spy Richard Tomlinson will tell the Princess Diana inquest that he believes Ritz hotel security chief Henri Paul met an MI6 handler on the night she died.

Today we also reveal a French spy chief allegedly seen chatting to Paul on the night of the crash is refusing to give evidence at the inquest.

Mr Tomlinson, a former MI6 officer once jailed for leaking Government secrets, will make sensational claims via a videolink from his bolthole in France to the inquest in London.

He is refusing to return to Britain to give evidence in person because he fears he will be arrested and jailed. Cambridge-educated Mr Tomlinson, 40, will give evidence supporting the claim by Harrods tycoon Mohamed Al Fayed that there was an Establishment plot to kill Diana to stop her marrying his son, Dodi, a Muslim.

Private testimony that Mr Tomlinson gave earlier caused ructions within MI6, leading to him being closely monitored by the British security services. Mr Tomlinson told the French examining magistrate Herve Stephan that a Frenchman working in the security department at the Paris Ritz was on MI6’s books.

He added: “I cannot claim that I remember from reading this file that the name of the person was Henri Paul but I have no doubt with the benefit of hindsight that it was he.”

In 2001 he claimed: “Henri Paul, who was the driver at the time of the accident, was an MI6 informer and, rather interestingly, he was missing for about half an hour before the accident.

“No one knows where he was and then when he was killed he was found with a very high alcohol level in his blood and a very substantial amount of money in his pocket.

“Now putting those three pieces of circumstantial evidence together, I suspect that shortly prior to his death he was in a meeting with his MI6 handler.

“I think that MI6 should hand over his personal file as a witness statement because clearly in an inquest into his death, knowing where he was for that missing half hour, who he was with and how much alcohol he had drunk are very important factors.

“What I am saying is that there is important information in MI6 files and I think that they should be handed over to the judge in charge of the inquest.”

Speaking exclusively to the Sunday Express from his home in France, Mr Tomlinson said he will reveal discussions he had within MI6 in May 1992 with a colleague about an assassination plot.

The Sunday Express has been given the identity of the MI6 man he spoke to but we are not publishing his name on the grounds that his security may be compromised.

Mr Tomlinson said: “I was having a serious discussion with a colleague on developing and targeting operations in the Balkans. These were known as P/40s. He handed me a Y-file, identified as most restricted by the yellow stripe on the front. Inside was a document, two typed pages long, with a small yellow card attached to signify it was an accountable account rather than a draft proposal.

“Accountable meant it was in a ready to act state. It was entitled ‘The Need to Assassinate President Milosevic of Serbia’. I distributed it to senior MI6 officers.

“There were detailed discussions and the consensus was that a stun device could be used to dazzle the driver’s gaze of Milosevic’s car as it passed through the Geneva tunnel, forcing him to crash.”

Milosevic was to attend an international conference on the former Yugoslavia.

Mr Tomlinson added: “What later struck me about the deaths of Diana and Dodi was that the claims how they had died mimicked what was in the document on how to assassinate Milosevic.

“I will testify that the Y-file document shows Henri Paul could have been blinded as he drove through the Paris underpass by a high-powered flashlight.

“The Y-file proves this was a technique which, at the time of Diana and Dodi’s deaths, was consistent with MI6 methods.”

The inquest into the death of Diana and Dodi has seen CCTV footage of the couple in and around the Ritz Hotel in Paris on the night of August 30, 1997.

But the inquest has been told there were gaps in the movements of Henri Paul, the hotel’s acting head of security. He left the hotel between 7pm and 10pm, thinking his duties were over, but returned when Diana and Mr Fayed unexpectedly returned to the hotel for a meal.

Where Mr Paul went during those crucial three hours has never been fully explained. There is also a period when he went missing for eight and a half minutes from 10.22pm when he was not picked up on any CCTV cameras.

The investigation into the crash carried out by former Metropolitan Police chief Lord Stevens decided that Mr Tomlinson was unreliable and that he had embellished his accounts.

Scotland Yard detectives working for Lord Stevens carried out detailed investigations at MI6. They discovered that an MI6 officer, codenamed Fish, did write a proposal in 1993 to assassinate an extremist Balkans leader, but it was not Milosevic, and senior officers in the service said the man was acting alone and the plan would not have been sanctioned.

Mr Tomlinson said: “The two Stevens’ detectives said in their own inquiries at MI6 that it became very clear that what I had told them, and which they had confirmed in the MI6 files, would have an important influence on how the Stevens inquiry finally reported.

“There is no doubt at all there was a major intelligence presence in events leading up to the death of Princess Diana and Dodi.”

New Zealand born Mr Tomlinson joined MI6 as agent D/813317 in 1991. He worked as a “targeting officer”, serving in the Balkans and Moscow. Later he served in the East European Controllerate, one of the most important departments in the Secret Intelligence Service. It gave him access to the highly restricted Y-files.

He was sacked in 1995 and was jailed for a year in December 1997 for breaching the Official Secrets Act, a sentence which has left him with bitter memories.

He says he does not know why he was sacked, but admits he was depressed when he finished working in Bosnia because of the dreadful sights he witnessed. Last March the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it would not be prosecuting Mr Tomlinson for offences under the Official Secrets Act.

The then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith decided it would not be in the public interest to continue legal action against him.

It was alleged that Mr Tomlinson had committed blackmail offences by threatening to make more disclosures because Scotland Yard would not return computers seized from him.

Other posts about the inquest can be seen here.

Princess Diana Inquest

Yorkshire Post - Prince Philip 'told MI6 to murder Diana and lover'

SENSATIONAL claims that Princess Diana was murdered on the instructions of the Duke of Edinburgh after she expressed fears of an attempt on her life dominated the opening of the inquest into her death yesterday.

The jury heard allegations that Prince Philip was at the heart of a conspiracy to murder Diana and her lover, Dodi Fayed, after ordering MI6 to prepare a report on them for the Royal Family. The car crash that killed them both in Paris on August 31, 1997 was then engineered, the jury heard.

The claim of murder by Dodi's father, Harrods owner Mohamed al-Fayed, was at the heart of coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker's opening statement to the jury at the inquest at the High Court in London yesterday.

And the jury was told how Diana had expressed fears that she would be the victim of an arranged accident if, as she believed, the Queen abdicated and Prince Charles succeeded to the throne, saying that would create a need to "get rid of her, via some accident in her car such as prepared brake failure".

The judge told the jury of six women and five men that many had come to believe something "sinister" may lie behind the crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in which Diana, 36, and 42-year-old Dodi were killed with their driver, Henri Paul.

He added that Mr al-Fayed also believes MI6 had been commissioned to write a special report on his family to be presented to the Royal Family.

The judge said: "It is his belief that a decision was taken at that time to kill Diana and Dodi. He places Prince Philip at the heart of the conspiracy, you will have to listen carefully to the witnesses you hear to see whether there is any evidence to support this assertion."

Mr al-Fayed believes that Diana was carrying Dodi's child and that they would have announced their engagement on September 1 that year, the day after the crash, but the Royal Family "could not accept that an Egyptian Muslim could eventually be stepfather to the future King of England".

He is convinced that Henri Paul was in the pay of MI6 and French secret services, and the crash was caused by a combination of a collision with a mystery white Fiat Uno and a blinding flash from a stun gun deliberately fired. Two official inquiries concluded that Paul had been drinking and lost control of the car whilst driving too fast. But the inquest heard that Diana had written a note to her ex-butler, Paul Burrell, saying Prince Charles wanted her dead so he could marry their nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Diana also claimed Ms Legge-Bourke had undergone an abortion.

The jury was told of a note written by one of Diana's lawyers, Lord Mishcon, following a meeting at Kensington Palace in October 1995.

In the note, Lord Mishcon said: "Her Royal Highness said that she had been informed by reliable sources whom she did not wish to reveal ... that (a) The Queen would be abdicating in April and the Prince of Wales would then assume the throne and (b) efforts would be made if not to get rid of her (be it by some accident in her car such as prepared brake failure or whatever) between now and then."

Lord Justice Scott Baker also said Mr al-Fayed had claimed Diana had told him she believed her life was in danger.

He said: "Mohamed al-Fayed says during the summer holiday she often told him she would be murdered by the Royal Family.

"She would go up in a helicopter and never come down alive."

He went on: "It is clear that there are many members of the public who are concerned that something sinister may have caused the collision in which Diana and two others died.

"One of the purposes of the inquest is to investigate the incident thoroughly so that the public suspicion is either dispelled or substantiated."

He said there would be a "vigorous and searching" investigation of the evidence to find the truth.

Lord Justice Scott Baker told the jury: "Most, if not all, of you will remember where you were when you heard about the subsequent death of the Princess of Wales.

"None of you would for a moment have thought that over 10 years later you might be in a jury investigating the events related to that tragic August night."

The inquest is set to continue for up to six months.

Other related posts:

6000 Page Diana Legal Dossier Disappears

Diana Inquest Coroner Steps Down

Spy Banned From Diana Inquest

Diana Inquest Will Be Heard By Jury

6000 Page Diana Legal Dossier Disappears

Daily Mail - Entire 6,000 page Diana dossier 'disappears' from Paris archives

The entire 6,000-page French legal dossier into the death of Princess Diana has vanished from the court archives in Paris, a lawyer claimed last night.

The mass of official documents - which stand one metre tall - was stored at the Palais de Justice central court building in the French capital.

It was compiled over three years during the official investigation in crash by French investigating magistrate Judge Herve Stephan.

But lawyer Jean-Louis Pelletier - who represents Paris paparazzi Fabrice Chassery - said when he asked to view the dossier, he was told it had disappeared.

Even a search of the court documents archives below the court building failed to uncover the hundreds of missing files.

The bizarre disappearance will fuel conspiracy theories that the highly sensitive dossier has been stolen because it contains information that Diana's death was more than a simple accident.

Another possibility is that bungling French court workers have simply "lost" the mountain of paperwork.

Other copies of the dossier still exist however. One has been sent to Lord Stevens, who is heading the British investigation into Paris accident, and another made for Lord Justice Scott Baker, the coroner at the inquest into Diana's death in London this October.

The disappearance of the Paris dossier now raises the near comic prospect of the British having to give the French back a copy of their own missing paperwork, which they sent Britain in 2005.

In Paris, Mr Pelletier said he needed to view the dossier because his client Mr Chassery, who arrived at the crash scene on the night Diana died on August 31, 1997, was still being pursued for manslaughter over the crash.

He said: "When I went in to the court to ask to see the files, I was told they weren't there.

"I know files go missing from time to time, but bearing in mind the size and importance of this particular one, it is extraordinary."

The original dossier contains thousands of pages of witness statements, the results of forensic tests on drunk chauffeur Henri Paul, photos of the crash scene and of those who died, and crucial interviews with all those involved in one of the biggest investigations in French legal history.

Copies of the dossier that were made only contained photocopies of signed documents and many did not include any photographs of the victims or the crash scene, Mr Pelletier said.

He added: "I went to every different part of the court building, thinking perhaps it had been moved from the high court archives to the criminal court or the appeal court, but no one could find it.

"A search on the computer to try to locate also revealed nothing.

"I am amazed that something like this could simply vanish."

Mr Pelletier said he needed to view parts of the dossier to defend his client against an ongoing prosecution by Mohamed Al Fayed that the French photographers who followed Diana's car on the night she died had caused the crash.

A spokesman for the Palais de Justice said: "Several requests have been made by those connected to the Diana crash investigation to view the dossier, but the paperwork is not immediately available."

It is the second time this year that elements of the dossier have vanished.

Mr Pelletier said when he viewed the dossier last May, he found photos of Diana and Dodi taken at the crash scene had gone.

He said: "It was odd. One week the photo was there and the next it was gone.

"It was a photo taken by my client Mr Chassery and at the time I believed it had been stolen. But now it is much worse. The entire dossier has gone missing."

Diana Inquest Coroner Steps Down

BBC - Diana inquest coroner steps down

Lady Butler-Sloss said she lacked the experience required to deal with an inquest with a jury.

Lord Justice Scott Baker will take over as coroner for the inquests, which are expected to take place in October.

My previous posts on the Diana inquest:

Spy Banned From Diana Inquest

Diana Inquest Will Be Heard By Jury

Princess Diana Inquest (link to article no longer works)

Spy Banned From Diana Inquest

Mirror.co.uk - DIANA DEATH: EX-SPY IS GAGGED

A FORMER spy who claimed MI6 might have been involved in Princess Diana's car crash has been banned from giving evidence at the inquest.

Richard Tomlinson, Britain's MI6 agent in France between 1991 and 1995, has been gagged by the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith.

Here is my previous post on this inquest.