The Murder of Princess Diana (16 page)
Read The Murder of Princess Diana Online
Authors: Noel Botham
Tags: #Biographies & Memoirs, #Leaders & Notable People, #Royalty, #Princess Diana, #True Accounts, #Murder & Mayhem, #True Crime, #History, #Europe, #England, #Modern (16th-21st Centuries), #20th Century, #Politics & Social Sciences, #Social Sciences, #Communication & Media Studies, #Media Studies
ELEVEN
As the black Mercedes S280 carrying Diana, Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed was driven down the one-way rue Cambon, photographers were still snapping pictures of them through the plain-glass windows. Some were already mounting their motorcycles, preparing to give chase, but the couple would have believed at that point that they had only a little more than five minutes of exposure left before arriving at Dodi’s apartment, less than a mile-and-a-half away.
As Henri Paul steered the big car right into the rue de Rivoli, some of the paparazzi, who had been waiting at the front entrance of the Ritz in the Place Vendôme, were streaming out of the rue de Castiglione into the same major thoroughfare, but 150 yards to their rear. At this moment, no one was doing anything stupid. All it required was for Henri Paul to drive at a reasonable speed straight up the Champs Elysées. The worst that could happen, if they were forced to stop at traffic lights, was that the paparazzi may get a few more sideways shots of the lovers. There could be no life-threatening incidents on this, the widest, straightest and best-policed avenue in the French capital.
Except, Richard Tomlinson believes, that one of the central characters involved, Henri Paul, was marching to the beat of a different drum to the others being conveyed in the Mercedes that night—and would not be taking the expected route. The acting security chief of the Ritz had his own agenda, and what happened next, it is believed, was exactly what had all along been intended. One thing is utterly certain: the final outcome was not the finale that had been promised to Henri Paul. He too was to prove a gullible victim of Diana’s killers.
If one accepts the premise that the wad of cash in Paul’s pocket, and the recent huge payments into his secret bank accounts, were to pay for his cooperation in an arranged incident, then what happened next was all part of the plan dictated by his intelligence paymasters. At the traffic lights outside the Crillon Hotel he turned the car left into the Place de la Concorde. But then, instead of going almost immediately right into the Champs Elysées and taking the shortest, safest and most direct route to Dodi’s apartment, he continued south along the west side of the square, past the Paris twin of Cleopatra’s needle in London, almost as far as the river Seine. There he cut the traffic lights on red, and swung the Mercedes right onto the fast-track dual freeway Cours la Reine. This put him on a heading parallel to the river, and at an angle fifty degrees at variance with his intended destination. And he was speeding up.
Hervé Stephan, the judge in charge of the crash investigation never bothered to investigate why Henri Paul had taken this very indirect route to Dodi’s apartment.
Almost immediately after joining the Cours la Reine they entered the first of a series of tunnels which are designed to keep traffic on this central city freeway moving smoothly. By the end of this 300-yard tunnel, which stretched between the two bridges, Pont des Invalides and Pont Alexandre III, Henri Paul had already put a considerable distance between himself and the paparazzi, who were showing no particular eagerness to catch up. There would be few opportunities to take a decent picture en route. Unlike the Champs Elysées, this route was not well lit, and the backcloth of darkness and the unlighted interior of the car would cause too many reflections off the windows to capture a decent shot of the occupants. There would be plenty of time and opportunity to take their pictures, they rationalized, when they reached journey’s end. Most of those who were later interviewed said they envisaged another chaotic crowd outside Dodi’s apartment. Many of the pack had already assumed where their destination would be and had given up the chase. These had peeled off at the Champs Elysées to go directly to the rue Arsène Houssaye.
At least one other vehicle, however, was heading in the same direction as the Mercedes, and on the same road—a white Fiat Uno, possibly the same hatchback spotted by Trevor Rees-Jones in the rue Cambon and earlier in the Place Vendôme, and almost certainly driven by a well-known personality among the paparazzi, James Andanson, another sometime employee of MI6. A millionaire with a murky past, he would later lie to the French police about having been in Paris that night. As I will explain more fully later, Andanson was already under investigation by the French equivalent of Special Branch, who were reinvestigating the alleged suicide of former prime minister Pierre Bérégovoy.
Curiously, the Fiat was in front of the Mercedes. Richard Tomlinson believed that Andanson had no need to follow Henri Paul, because he knew precisely which route they were both taking.
As he passed the last turnoff, on the Cours Albert I
er
, 350 yards before the Alma tunnel, Henri Paul was driving at a steady 64 miles per hour (102 kilometers per hour), though it would take a further six years to discover this known statistic from a speed-camera printout and photograph, the existence of which police consistently denied. He might have turned off there, up the slip road leading to the Avenue George V which led almost straight to Dodi’s apartment, still nearly a mile away.
er
, 350 yards before the Alma tunnel, Henri Paul was driving at a steady 64 miles per hour (102 kilometers per hour), though it would take a further six years to discover this known statistic from a speed-camera printout and photograph, the existence of which police consistently denied. He might have turned off there, up the slip road leading to the Avenue George V which led almost straight to Dodi’s apartment, still nearly a mile away.
They had already traveled more than a mile, and each extra yard now covered would take them farther away from their destination.
A witness would tell later that a motorcyclist had stopped in the middle of the exit ramp on the Cours Albert I
er
, effectively blocking it to traffic. But Henri Paul nevertheless apparently made no attempt to take this slip-road exit, and it was assumed it was not his intention to do so.
er
, effectively blocking it to traffic. But Henri Paul nevertheless apparently made no attempt to take this slip-road exit, and it was assumed it was not his intention to do so.
Another explanation is that he had been told to drive through the Alma tunnel by undercover agents who were paying him.
Just yards from the entrance to the Alma tunnel, the Mercedes had pulled into the left-hand lane of the outside freeway. Henri Paul was obliged to do this in order to pass the Fiat Uno, still ahead of them and in the right-hand lane. It had been crawling along shortly before the tunnel entrance, and had now begun to pick up speed. Police have refused to say whether it was also photographed by the speed camera which logged the Mercedes.
Just before they arrived in the tunnel, a motorcycle with a pillion passenger had passed them and taken a lead position in front of the two cars. The motorcyclist and his passenger were never identified, and therefore it remains unknown if they were photographers. Certainly at this moment the nearest identifiable paparazzi were still traveling in a swarm at least half a mile behind.
As the Mercedes reached the tunnel and was about to cross the notorious hump at its entrance, two things occurred almost simultaneously: first a speed camera, set in the tunnel roof, took a photograph of the Mercedes, the flash showing Henri Paul to be looking normal, Trevor Rees-Jones slightly apprehensive and the couple in the back laughing; and second, the Fiat Uno, still gaining speed, eased left into the path of the Mercedes. It is beyond coincidence that this particular car and driver, who had dawdled in the approaches to the tunnel so obviously awaiting the arrival of the Mercedes, should speed up and deliberately swerve into its path, precisely on the threshold of the most notorious black spot on the river freeway. It was at this precise point the driver could be guaranteed to do the most damage, and then be in a position to speed away after the crash without stopping to offer assistance.
Henri Paul was forced to swerve violently to the left in order to avoid a major collision with the smaller car, but he wasn’t quite fast enough to miss it completely. He clipped the left-hand side of the rear bumper and the red taillight of the Fiat with his right wing mirror, wing and front door as the cars swept down into the dip in the road which follows the hump. This may have been the moment when an alarmed Trevor Rees-Jones snatched his seat belt across his chest. He did not succeed in buckling up. What he says he does remember now is that on three separate occasions he had told the couple in the back to fasten their seat belts, and that they had failed to comply.
The Mercedes was now angled toward the center of the dual freeway, which at this point began to bend quite sharply to the left. Henri Paul’s left flick of the wheel to avoid the smaller car might in itself have been slightly hazardous, but need not, in normal circumstances, have proved fatal.
But these were far from normal circumstances.
According to one witness, at the same moment that Henri Paul turned the Mercedes left in an attempt to avoid collision with the Fiat Uno—almost at the precise instant, in fact, when the two cars touched, the pillion passenger on the motorcycle in front turned around and suddenly directed the full glare of an immensely powerful hand-held searchlight at the limousine’s windshield. A second witness, following in a car behind, spoke of seeing a bright flash, which she thought was from a camera, from beyond the Mercedes, a split second before the crash.
Lights such as these are used as weapons by the SAS in surprise raids. They blind and mentally disorient the enemy for up to a full minute. A senior SAS officer told me, “The effect on a driver, at night particularly, is catastrophic. He is totally blinded and mentally stunned. He would be incapable of steering a car. Indeed any bright light directed suddenly in the driver’s eyes at that moment, when he had been forced to swerve left, would have had lethal consequences.” Suddenly blind and utterly disoriented in the midst of a tricky steering maneuver, at sixty-four miles per hour and running so close to the central concrete pillars, he stood very little chance.
There are no crash barriers in the Alma tunnel and no safety walls to scrape along. Said Richard Tomlinson, “A tunnel is a perfect place for an assassination.” It has fewer witnesses, and the Paris tunnel is ideal because there are no crash railings along the central pillars which separate the two freeways. It is deadly.
In his perilous predicament, Henri Paul may have pushed the automatic gear lever into neutral, frantically searching for a lower gear to slow the car without fierce braking; this could account for the racing engine noise that some witnesses describe. But, as with every other aspect of the crash, the police have absolutely refused to say if the car was in gear or in neutral. Nor, they say, will they ever do so.
In the split second that was all Henri Paul had to act, he did not skid and he did not brake. There were tire marks on the road, but road-accident experts say they were not caused by Diana’s car.
Then the Mercedes S280, still traveling at sixty-four miles per hour, ran headlong into the thirteenth concrete pillar in the central dividing reservation. The airbags all functioned on impact, but as none of the passengers was restrained by seat belts they gave minimal protection.
Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul died almost instantly. Trevor Rees-Jones was knocked unconscious and had, literally, the whole of the front of his face ripped away.
Diana received a massive, and eventually fatal, internal injury when her body was hurled violently by the car’s momentum against the seat in front. She wasn’t trapped, as even though the front had been almost totally crushed on impact, the rear of the car was relatively undamaged. Diana was lodged in the well between the back seat and the passenger seat in front.
Smoke, steam and water were spurting from the shattered engine, and the blast of the horn eerily reverberated along the tunnel and into the night in the Place de l’Alma above.
The Fiat Uno and the motorcycle were already exiting the tunnel at the far end.
“Everything had happened,” said Richard Tomlinson, “exactly as specified in the MI6 plan to kill Slobodan Milosevic.”
Explained ex-MI5 officer David Shayler, “Vehicle ‘accidents’ are used as a way of assassination precisely because they are such a common cause of death. It is easy for the authorities to claim that anyone crying foul play is simply a ‘conspiracy theorist. ’”
Unless Trevor Rees-Jones recovers his memory, or decides to speak out, no one will ever know, for certain, the exact details of the murder of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul, but the evidence now available six years after the crash indicates that the description I have given is accurate in all its essential details. One of the only other men who might have provided the full story, James Andanson, who would later boast to friends that he witnessed the death of Diana, was himself found dead in extremely suspicious circumstances in May 2000.
This was an opportunist killing. Had her assassins not succeeded in this murder attempt, and had the princess survived the crash, there would have been further opportunities to finish the job. The senior SAS officer told me, “Something could have been arranged in the time between the crash and her being transferred to hospital. Or there could easily have occurred a ‘regrettable medical accident’ in the hospital, leading to her death. Such things have happened before. And had the attempt had to be aborted that night, another opportunity would no doubt have presented itself before too long. If a professional assassination squad wanted her dead, then sooner or later they would have succeeded. The odds would not have been on her side.”
I have driven through the Alma tunnel myself, in a similar-sized car, and in excess of sixty-five miles per hour. I entered the tunnel in the left lane and swerved the car suddenly left, as Henri Paul did, just before the crash pillar. I was able to correct the steering, despite the dip, without difficulty.
I would also stress that I am not a professional driver.
The Mercedes was doing just sixty-four miles per hour, as the French police well know, despite their trying to perpetuate the myth that it was traveling much faster. When Scotland Yard senior detectives visited the tunnel in April 2004, it was stated that an unnamed racing driver had refused to go through the tunnel at seventy-five miles per hour, saying, reportedly, that it was much too risky. There are dips and turns on the Monaco Grand Prix circuit which are much more dangerous and taken at much higher speeds. In my opinion this was just another public-relations stunt to support the Paris police’s deliberately distorted version of events.
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