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This article appeared in the
June 12, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence
Review.
Comprehensive background on the circles implicated in the murder of Princess Diana
can be found in EIR's 1997 Special Report, The True
Story Behind the Fall of the House of Windsor.
Shortly
after midnight, on Aug. 30-31, 1997, David Laurent, an off-duty senior French
police official, was driving alone in his car on the right bank of the Seine
River, heading toward the Place de l'Alma tunnel where, moments later, Diana
Princess of Wales, her companion Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul would die in
a car crash. As he drove, Laurent was passed by a speeding white Fiat Uno,
according to accounts he provided nine months ago to French Criminal Brigade
police probing the Diana crash. As he approached the tunnel, Laurent noticed
that the Fiat Uno that had sped by him, was now crawling along in the right
traffic lane, almost at a standstill, just before the tunnel entrance.
Although the behavior of the Fiat driver was a bit bizarre, Laurent drove
on. It was, after all, Saturday night on the final weekend of the summer, and
there were a lot of strange goings-on on the streets of Paris. Less than a
moment later, however, Laurent heard a loud explosion from inside the tunnel,
as he was driving a short distance ahead.
It was not until the next morning that Laurent realized that the explosion
he had heard from inside the tunnel was the crash that claimed the lives of
Diana and her companions. And it was not until several weeks later that police
forensic tests confirmed that the crash had been caused by a collision between
the Mercedes 280-S carrying Diana, Fayed, Paul, and bodyguard Trevor
Rees-Jones, the sole survivor of the crash, and a Fiat Uno. Within hours of the
crash, police at the scene had gathered up evidence--a side mirror and
fragments of a tail light--suggesting that a two-car collision had occurred. A
police sketch, drawn at the crash site, labeled a section of the tunnel the
"collision zone." Several witnesses, interviewed during the first week after
the crash, had described a small hatchback car, cutting in front of the
Mercedes at the tunnel entrance, jamming its breaks inside the tunnel, fleeing
the crash scene, and so on.
But, until Laurent's critical piece of the story became public in early
June, the role of the Fiat had remained ambiguous--despite the fact that the
car and its driver have disappeared. Was the missing Fiat tragically in the
wrong place at the wrong time, or was it critical to the most spectacular
vehicular homicide in history?
Laurent's description of the Fiat, speeding to a spot near the tunnel
entrance, less than a minute ahead of Diana's car, which was under chase from
several other cars and motorcycles, strongly suggests the latter
possibility.
For reasons yet unexplained, Laurent's crucial eyewitness account was
withheld from the chief investigating magistrate, Hervé Stephan, for
months.
This
is not the first time that the French police in charge of the investigation
have tampered with evidence. Within hours of the crash, French police had told
reporters that the Mercedes carrying Diana had been travelling at speeds of
more than 120 miles per hour. How did they know? They told reporters that the
speedometer of the mangled Mercedes had been frozen at more than 120 mph.
EIR investigators determined that the French "leak" had to be a lie.
Daimler Benz safety experts had told EIR reporters that, in any crash,
the speedometer immediately goes back to zero. Two weeks later, the French
police "corrected" the error; but this time, the media scarcely reported the
correction. Similarly, French police had lied to reporters that Diana had been
pinned in the rear compartment of the Mercedes, and saying that this was why it
took so long to get her into an ambulance and to a hospital. Photographic
evidence and eyewitness accounts later proved that it, too, was a premeditated
lie by the French police.
In the case of the Laurent testimony, sources tell EIR that the
police have claimed that they have withheld certain vital evidence from
Magistrate Stephan, to avoid the information falling into the hands of the
attorneys for the paparazzi. The police allegedly claimed that their
investigation "would be jeopardized" if the paparazzi were to learn crucial
details.
The Laurent revelation, which was leaked to the London Daily Mirror
on June 4 by a well-placed French police source, was not the only new piece of
evidence to emerge in early June. On June 3, the British independent television
network ITV aired a one-hour investigative report, "Diana: The Secrets Behind
the Crash," that seriously discredits French police claims that driver Henri
Paul was drunk at the time of the crash.
The
assertion that Paul was drunk and high on two prescription drugs is pivotal to
the ongoing effort, by the French government and the British establishment, to
cast the crash as nothing more than a case of reckless, drunk driving. The
claim that Paul had blood alcohol levels three times the legal limit at the
time of the crash, was based solely on tests conducted by French coroners
within hours of the crash. Independent forensic experts, including Dr. Peter
Vanesis of the University of Glasgow, who reviewed the autopsy report, had
harsh criticisms of the post mortem on numerous technical grounds.
The ITV report revealed that the forensic tests also showed a near-lethal
level of carbon monoxide as well. EIR has independently learned that it
was a separate toxicological test on Paul's blood sample, that revealed a
carbon monoxide level of more than 30% at the time of the crash.
Yet, Dodi Fayed had no carbon monoxide in his blood. Is it possible that
Paul could have had high levels of alcohol, traces of two prescription drugs,
and toxic levels of carbon monoxide in his blood at the moment of the crash,
and yet Fayed had no carbon monoxide present? Not if the carbon monoxide was
inside the passenger cabin of the Mercedes.
Furthermore, if Paul had been somehow poisoned with carbon monoxide sometime
prior to getting behind the wheel of the Mercedes, experts interviewed by ITV
say he would have shown obvious signs, such as dizziness, loss of balance, loss
of depth perception, and an unbearable, throbbing pain in his temple. Security
camera video footage of Paul, taken in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel between 9
p.m. and midnight, and aired in the ITV documentary, clearly showed that Paul
had none of the tell-tale signs of being drunk or suffering from the effects of
carbon monoxide.
In a live television interview, aired one hour after the ITV broadcast, the
documentary's host, Nicholas Owen, stated that he believed that the blood
sample used in the post mortem was probably not taken from Paul. There
were a dozen other corpses in the Paris city morgue at the time that Paul was
brought in. This startling conclusion by Owen, adds further weight to
EIR's charge that the French police--as distinct from chief
investigating Magistrate Stephan--have been running a vicious cover-up of the
events surrounding the crash.
The ITV documentary also cited several eyewitness accounts that a powerful
burst of light inside the tunnel, seconds before the crash, may have blinded
Paul. Owen showed a commercially produced anti-personnel laser, that he
purchased in a Paris shop for $300, to buttress the possibility that such a
device was used in the vehicular attack.
EIR Counterintelligence Director Jeffrey Steinberg appeared along
with Owen and a half-dozen other investigators and expert analysts on the
nationally televised interview show. Details of that broadcast and the vortex
of media controversy, sparked by the ITV show and a second documentary, aired
on June 4 on Channel Four TV in Britain, will appear in a forthcoming
EIR (see also, the
Editorial in this issue).
In a move that promises to raise even more questions about what happened in
the Paris tunnel on Aug. 31, 1997, Magistrate Stephan convened an extraordinary
group interrogation, or "confrontation," on June 5, at the Justice Ministry in
Paris. Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi's father and a civil party to the case, was
invited to participate, as were a dozen eyewitnesses to the crash. The nine
paparazzi who stand to be prosecuted for manslaughter and interference in the
rescue effort, were also interrogated by Stephan. Details of what took place
are not yet available.
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