Richard claims that Diana was spied on for 15 years until the night she died ...
He says: "We were given a standing instruction to keep her in our sights. Even in the early days when she thought she could drive herself to visit friends, she was being followed everywhere - and not just by one car."
At her favourite London restaurant, San Lorenzo, every word the Princess uttered was recorded.
Charles dismissed her as paranoid.
The Times 8 October 1998 Report on murder in January 1997 Extracts:
He says: "We were given a standing instruction to keep her in our sights. Even in the early days when she thought she could drive herself to visit friends, she was being followed everywhere - and not just by one car."
At her favourite London restaurant, San Lorenzo, every word the Princess uttered was recorded.
Charles dismissed her as paranoid.
Who Killed Diana Extracts
- For Jean Norman, an Oxford-based typist, prying on other people mobile phone calls was a hobby. She switched on her radio scanner and heard what appears to have been the beginning of the Diana/Gilbey conversation. Her recording ends with a few remarks that appear on the beginning of another a tape recorded by Cyril Reenan, a retired bank manager. Reenan appears to have recorded the remainder of the conversation, and he realized when it ended that it was worth big money.
- It emerged from Morman and Reeman that the recordings were not made at the time of the call but four days later on January 4, 1990.
- It meant that a third party must have recorded the conversation at the time it occurred, then played the tape later through a transmitter on the Cellnet frequency so that Norman and Reenan would pick it up.
- Audiotel International analysed both tapes and concluded that though they were picked up by receivers tuned to the Cellnet frequency, they were not normal Cellnet signals. The data bursts on the tapes suggested "some kind of doctoring", the firm's report said. Pauses in the conversation were suspiciously lacking in interference and Andrew Martin, Audiotel managing director, concluded that they were unlikely to be the result of haphazard scanning. He added "The balance of probability suggest something irregular about the recording which may indicate a re-broadcasting of the conversation sometime after the conversation took place".
- These conclusions were supported by a study conducted by communications consultant John Nelson and audio expert Martin Colloms. They decided that the recordings could not have been made by intercepting the signals from a cellular phone base station. There was a fifty-hertz hum on the tape, suggesting there had been a tap on the ordinary telephone line. A spectrum analysis showed this was made up in places of two separate signals, indicating that a tape of the conversation had been subsequently remixed. The Princess's voice was relatively poor quality for reception of the Cellnet Band. More significantly, there were "pips" or "data bursts" on the recordings at eleven-second intervals. These would have been filtered out at the nearest telephone exchange prior to the Cellnet transmission.
Collums and Nelson concluded the recording must have been made as a result of local tapping of the telephone line somewhere between the female party's telephone itself and the local exchange.
New Idea Richard Tomlinson interview:
Richard also accuses the spy organisation of being behind the release of the scandalous 'Squidygate' tape. He claims Diana's indiscreet phone calls to close friend James Gilbey was recorded my MI6 and retransmitted days later - over and over - until it was picked up and taped by radio scanner enthusiasts.BBC TV Panorama interview
Diana: "It was done to harm me in a serious manner and that was not the first time I'd experienced what it was like being outside the net so to speak and not to be in the family".The Times 8 October 1998 Report on murder in January 1997 Extracts:
- A Royal Protection Squad officer twice used a remote-control device to disable his wife's car six months before murdering her, a court was told yesterday.
- The connections on the device were found to fit the murdered woman's Renault 19 exactly ... it stopped the car within a range of 200 yards ... no one ever needed to know that the device has been there...
- Mr. Coulton, 53, who worked as a protection officer at Buckingham Palace, denies murdering his wife, Particia.
The Chicago Tribune July 15, 1997
The 36-year-old princess was pictured late Monday leaning over a yacht and reportedly telling the reporters: "You are going to get a big surprise, you'll see. You are going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do."
Paris August 30
Frank Klein received a phone call from Dodi Fayed to say that he and Diana would be in Paris next day; that they were going to look at the Windsor Villa; and Dodi had arranged to pick up the engagement ring from Repossi's Jewelers.
London Sunday Mirror August 31, 1997
Senior Palace courtiers are ready to advise the Queen that she should refuse to renew the prestigious royal warrants for the Knightsbridge store when they come up for review in February.
It would be a huge blow to the ego of store owner Mohamed Al Fayed - and would infuriate Diana, who was yesterday understood to be still with Dodi aboard his yacht, near the Italian island of Sardinia. But the Royal Family are furious about the frolics of Di, 36, and Dodi, 41, which they believe have further undermined the monarchy.
Prince Philips, in particular, has made no secret as to how he feels about his daughter-in-law's latest man, referring to Dodi as an "oily bed-hopper."
At Balmoral next week, the Queen will preside over a meeting of The Way Ahead Group where the Windsors sit down with their senior advisers to discuss policy matters.
MI6 has prepared a special report on the Egyptian-born Fayeds which will be presented at the meeting.
A friend of the Royals said yesterday: "Prince Philip has let rip several times recently about the Fayeds Ð at a dinner party, during a country shoot, and while on a visit to close friends in Germany. .
"He's been banging on about his contempt for Dodi and how he is undesirable as a future stepfather to William and Harry.
"Diana has been told in no uncertain terms about the consequences should she continue the relationship with the Fayed boy.
"Options must include possible exile, although that would be very difficult as when all is said and done, she is the mother of the future King of England.
And Dodi has told Diana what he has told many of his other beautiful girlfriends in the past: "It's my father's store and you can have what you want. Charge it to my account and I'll just sign the bill."
But now the Royal Family may decide it's time to settle up.
New Idea Richard Tomlinson interview:
Richard also told the inquiry that MI6 renegades, fanatically loyal to the Crown, viewed Diana as a 'loose cannon' and would stop at nothing to eliminate her threat to eclipse the House of Windsor.
Daily Mail Richard Kay
In the evening of 31 August, Diana phoned Kay to say that she would finish up her engagements she already had committed to but that she would be withdrawing from public life around November.
Sunday Mirror 31/08/1997 Chris Hutchins Extracts
- A new shockwave has been recorded on the San Lorenzo Fault, that invisible line which runs from Kensington Palace to Buckingham Palace and passes directly under Princess Diana's favourite restaurant and gossip shop.
- A new tape recording is doing the rounds of Belgravia dinner parties. And this one is hot, hot, hot! Labelled Squidgygate II, the tape is of a completely different conversation the Princess had with her sometime beau James Gilbey. "It's absolutely outrageous," says a woman friend who heard the tape last week but was too polite to ask her hostess if she could make a copy for Confidential. "It is full of sexual innuendo and far more explicit than the one we all heard before."
Le Parisien (later report)
Diana's blood plasma contained hcg, a hormone manufactured only during pregnancy.
The People London reports that:
at least six MI6 agents were stationed at the British Embassy in Paris during the weekend of the crash. One officer had already been detailed to shadow Diana after her arrival from Sardinia. MI5 and MI6 both kept files on Mohammed al Fayed and Dodi, but security chiefs had held meetings about the two men's relationship with Diana in the weeks before the crash.
"The secret services have been known to hire snoopers who act as paparazzi to spy on targets."
Evening of 31 August Ritz security cameras
One of the photographers is inside the lobby. As they arrive at the front door a second photographer steps in front of Diana and manages to take a picture before being grabbed and thrown out. A grim faced Diana then enters the hotel, followed by the bodyguard Kes Wingfield, her boy friend, a few steps behind Dodi and Trevor Rees-Jones
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited June 1998 Extracts:
- Shortly afterwards, Henri Paul, parks his Mini outside the Ritz. It's just after 10 o'clock in Paris, 9 o'clock in London. Henri Paul, whose main job was acting Head of Security at the Ritz had been called on his mobile and came back in to work. One mystery - still unresolved is where he was during the evening, having left work just after 7 o'clock. Once inside, he drank two glasses of Ricard - an alcoholic aperitif - in the bar.
- A decoy vehicle would go to the front of the Ritz. Meanwhile they would escape by the back door. The Ritz security video shows their black Mercedes - supplied by a local hire company - being brought round for them.
- 19 minutes past 12. At the back of the Ritz, Diana and Dodi slip into the black Mercedes, Henri Paul takes over at the wheel. But the paparazzi monitor their every move and alert each other on mobile phones. Even the crowd knew what was going on. On the tourist video you can hear what is happening. "They're chasing Princess Diana!"
- This is where the journey began. The rear entrance to the Ritz there. The princess and Dodi joined Henri Paul the chauffeur and Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard and they set off down the rue Cambon, a narrow back street.
Henri Paul: Background
Claude Garrec: "All I can tell you is that he had contacts within the French and foreign intelligence services."
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extracts:
1.b. A former member of French intelligence has suggested to us that the security managers of major hotels are prime targets for recruitment - and the Ritz, with its glittering guest list of the rich and powerful would be of more interest than many.
2b. Apart from 2 accounts in a bank outside Paris, he also had 3 accounts and a safety deposit box here at the BNP in the Place Vendome, just opposite the Ritz. He also had another 3 bank accounts here at Barclays on the avenue de l'Opera - just a short walk from the Ritz. But that's not all. He also had one current and 4 deposit accounts here at the Caisse d'Epargne, just near the Louvre. In the 8 months before the crash, 40,000 francs - that's about £4,000 was paid in to an account here - on five separate occasions, each time in cash.
Richard Tomlinson: "I know Henri Paul worked for MI6." "I first came across Paul's name in 1992-93 in a dossier when I was investigating an arms dealer. There was reference to a meeting with Harrod's owner Mohammed Al Fayed and a reference to Henri Paul as a minor MI6 asset." "Paul would give MI6 guys access to hotel rooms to plant bugs..."
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
Just two days before the accident he completed a rigorous medical to renew his flying licence. The medical found no signs of alcoholism. For him, flying wasn't just a hobby. His flight logs show he was a regular flier and he'd taken courses for flying at night. And in all he had completed 605 hours flying time.
George Bielek, Flying Instructor: "He was a good man. Now, we never had problem with, with him and - he was a very serious and a quiet and er, he, he make you, his job very good in, in, in er, in flight. He was a good private pilot, serious, and er, he, he's looking for progressing each time."
Woman's Day Interview with Chloe Papazahariakis and Vlad Borovac Extracts:
- As they neared the Ritz, however, Chloe spotted the crowd of paparazzi ... She then turns the (video) camera on about 30 photographers - and unwittingly gets a side shot of a white, older-model Fiat Uno parked just outside the Ritz.
- Chloe and Vlad estimate it was 11.50 pm when bedlam broke out ... Attracted by the squeal of tyres, Chloe spins her camera in time to catch the Fiat speeding flat out after the Mercedes and Range Rover, on the wrong side of the road, and the wrong way up a one-way street.
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
1c. The investigating judge believes that as he approached the tunnel, Henri Paul saw a slow moving white Fiat Uno.
He tried to get round it but clipped the side of the car, lost control and skidded in to the thirteenth pillar. The Fiat Uno then drove away.
2c. There's a slip road on the right hand side about to come in and join us, just at the mouth of the tunnel. Anything coming out of there, you're really in difficulties. Then you get this strange kick to the left, but even at this speed there's a bit of throwing over to the left and then to the right. You lurch across the road. If anything goes wrong. Disaster. There's no protection in terms of any guard rail. Anybody who just deviates from the road only has to go a couple of feet on to the curb and you've got a solid accident taking place.
3c. Professor Murray McKay, Car Crash Expert: "The record for that tunnel is 13 deaths before this accident took place last August in the last dozen years or so."
Sunday Mirror 21/09/1997 Nick Pisa and Tracy Schaverien Extracts:
- A French police source said: "When the car left the Ritz, Mr Rees-Jones wasn't wearing a safety belt. Furthermore, he wasn't wearing it as the car crossed the Place de la Concorde. "It was only just before the tunnel that he buckled it. This saved his life. Was it because of the car's high speed?"
- London-born Brenda Wells, 40, told police how she was forced off the road by a motorbike following Diana's Mercedes at high speed. Ms Wells also saw a dark-coloured car - possibly the Fiat Uno which has now become the focal point of the French probe into the crash. In her statement she claims: "After a party with my friends, I was returning to my home. A motorbike with two men forced me off the road. It was following a big car. Afterwards in the tunnel there were very strong lights like flashes. After that, a black car arrived. The big car had come off the road. I stopped and five or six motorbikes arrived and started taking photographs. They were crying: 'It's Diana'."
Eye Witness M. Levistre:
I'm in the middle of the tunnel, I can see the head-lights approaching, you can see the head-lights because it's dark, it's night time. You could see the head-lights of the car coming with the motorbike head-lights because you can distinguish between the head-lights of a motorbike and those of a car, and the motorbike was driving along side the car, well now we can say that it's a Mercedes. Well, anyway, the motorbike when it enters...when the Mercedes comes, it drives over the crown of the road to enter the tunnel. At that moment, the Mercedes...the motorbike... accelerates and you can see the acceleration of the motorbike because you can see the head-light rise up a bit. The bike is accelerating. I am halfway through the tunnel, inside, when the motorbike accelerates, cuts the Mercedes up.
As we were going down, a Mercedes turned up behind me flashing its lights at me, so I moved back over to let it pass and the car went past me very, very fast. Very, very fast, I can still remember the sound it made, and it was followed by a motorbike ten metres or so behind. At that moment there's a big white flash.
A massive white light I'm looking in the rear-view mirror, and it's then - at that moment- that I see the motorbike, and I think to myself, well I think lots of things...I think why the cutting up, why did the motorbike cut them up?
It was stronger than a photo flash, or else it was a massive photo flash.
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
So what was that blinding light, Monsieur Levistre claims he saw in the tunnel. In the demonstration you've just seen, the first flash was from a paparazzi camera. But Monsieur Levistre identified the much bigger flash, the second one and that came from this piece of kit.
Now this is an anti personnel device - quite legal to buy in the UK - and it sets off one enormously powerful flash of light. Shine this in somebody's eyes and they are stunned, blinded, disabled for several minutes. If you're driving a car when it happens, you'll almost certainly crash.
We bought our anti personnel flash light in the west end of London for just over £260. But there's another version of this piece of kit. It's not available to the public. It's infinitely more powerful and it's used by army special forces - including the British - around the world.
BBC News Online: UK Diana crash airbags puzzle February 5, 1998
Reports say that the magistrate investigating the crash that killed Princess Diana is looking into what role, if any, was played by the airbags of the Mercedes in which she was travelling. The airbags in the car had already deployed and deflated when the vehicle crashed, according to the French tabloid Parisien Libere.
Quoting from a medical report, the paper said the airbags could already have been deflated when the Mercedes hit the 13th pillar of a tunnel under the Place de l'Alma in central Paris on August 31 last year.
The newspaper said that Herve Stephan, the magistrate investigating the crash in which Diana, her lover Dodi al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul died, had ordered a probe into whether the airbags had been set off by a previous collision or by accident.
Update (September 22, 1997): Agence-France-Presse report
British lawyer Gary Hunter in a hotel room directly above the Alma tunnel witnessing a small black car fleeing at 60-70 mph from the tunnel, after his hearing the crash and looking out of his third floor hotel window. Significantly, he added that his impression was that the car was running from the scene and that it "looked quite sinister" to him.
According to news accounts, he also said, "the car was being shadowed by a second vehicle, a white Mercedes."
PARIS (AP) Last modified at 3:50 p.m. on Wednesday, December 31, 1997
A judicial source told The Associated Press earlier this month that a witness in late November described seeing a small white car stopped in front of the Mercedes, just after the crash. He said he saw a man standing outside the car, speaking on a cellular telephone, and soon after he saw two men who had been in the vehicle running quickly out of the tunnel.
Eye Witnesses: Tom Richardson and Joanna Luz, residents of San Diego, California.
American tourists, they were walking along the Seine River when they heard a noise "like an explosion." Immediately they ran into the tunnel to offer assistance and "saw someone jump out from the car."
"A man started running towards us telling us to go," Richardson said.
Eye Witness Francois Levy
He entered the tunnel from the Cours Albert 1er. ahead of Brenda Wells.
"I saw the car (Mercedes 280s) in the middle of the tunnel with a motorcycle on its left, pulling ahead and then swerving to the right directly in front of the car (the Mercedes). As the motorcycle swerved and before the car lost control, there was a flash of light. But then I was out of the tunnel and heard, but did not see, the impact."
Levy added that he saw a powerful bike with two men aboard exit the tunnel immediately after the crash.
WASHINGTON, Sept 19 (AFP)
Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris, may have been six-weeks pregnant at the time of the accident, Time magazine said in its latest issue. Time Reported that an emergency-service doctor told the magazine that an associate at the scene said Diana was drifting in and out of consciousness, and at one point saying she was six-weeks pregnant while making a rubbing gesture on her belly.
http://www.public-interest.co.uk/diana/disurvey.htm
- A new shockwave has been recorded on the San Lorenzo Fault, that invisible line which runs from Kensington Palace to Buckingham Palace and passes directly under Princess Diana's favourite restaurant and gossip shop.
- A new tape recording is doing the rounds of Belgravia dinner parties. And this one is hot, hot, hot! Labelled Squidgygate II, the tape is of a completely different conversation the Princess had with her sometime beau James Gilbey. "It's absolutely outrageous," says a woman friend who heard the tape last week but was too polite to ask her hostess if she could make a copy for Confidential. "It is full of sexual innuendo and far more explicit than the one we all heard before."
Le Parisien (later report)
Diana's blood plasma contained hcg, a hormone manufactured only during pregnancy.
The People London reports that:
at least six MI6 agents were stationed at the British Embassy in Paris during the weekend of the crash. One officer had already been detailed to shadow Diana after her arrival from Sardinia. MI5 and MI6 both kept files on Mohammed al Fayed and Dodi, but security chiefs had held meetings about the two men's relationship with Diana in the weeks before the crash.
"The secret services have been known to hire snoopers who act as paparazzi to spy on targets."
Evening of 31 August Ritz security cameras
One of the photographers is inside the lobby. As they arrive at the front door a second photographer steps in front of Diana and manages to take a picture before being grabbed and thrown out. A grim faced Diana then enters the hotel, followed by the bodyguard Kes Wingfield, her boy friend, a few steps behind Dodi and Trevor Rees-Jones
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited June 1998 Extracts:
- Shortly afterwards, Henri Paul, parks his Mini outside the Ritz. It's just after 10 o'clock in Paris, 9 o'clock in London. Henri Paul, whose main job was acting Head of Security at the Ritz had been called on his mobile and came back in to work. One mystery - still unresolved is where he was during the evening, having left work just after 7 o'clock. Once inside, he drank two glasses of Ricard - an alcoholic aperitif - in the bar.
- A decoy vehicle would go to the front of the Ritz. Meanwhile they would escape by the back door. The Ritz security video shows their black Mercedes - supplied by a local hire company - being brought round for them.
- 19 minutes past 12. At the back of the Ritz, Diana and Dodi slip into the black Mercedes, Henri Paul takes over at the wheel. But the paparazzi monitor their every move and alert each other on mobile phones. Even the crowd knew what was going on. On the tourist video you can hear what is happening. "They're chasing Princess Diana!"
- This is where the journey began. The rear entrance to the Ritz there. The princess and Dodi joined Henri Paul the chauffeur and Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard and they set off down the rue Cambon, a narrow back street.
Henri Paul: Background
Claude Garrec: "All I can tell you is that he had contacts within the French and foreign intelligence services."
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extracts:
1.b. A former member of French intelligence has suggested to us that the security managers of major hotels are prime targets for recruitment - and the Ritz, with its glittering guest list of the rich and powerful would be of more interest than many.
2b. Apart from 2 accounts in a bank outside Paris, he also had 3 accounts and a safety deposit box here at the BNP in the Place Vendome, just opposite the Ritz. He also had another 3 bank accounts here at Barclays on the avenue de l'Opera - just a short walk from the Ritz. But that's not all. He also had one current and 4 deposit accounts here at the Caisse d'Epargne, just near the Louvre. In the 8 months before the crash, 40,000 francs - that's about £4,000 was paid in to an account here - on five separate occasions, each time in cash.
Richard Tomlinson: "I know Henri Paul worked for MI6." "I first came across Paul's name in 1992-93 in a dossier when I was investigating an arms dealer. There was reference to a meeting with Harrod's owner Mohammed Al Fayed and a reference to Henri Paul as a minor MI6 asset." "Paul would give MI6 guys access to hotel rooms to plant bugs..."
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
Just two days before the accident he completed a rigorous medical to renew his flying licence. The medical found no signs of alcoholism. For him, flying wasn't just a hobby. His flight logs show he was a regular flier and he'd taken courses for flying at night. And in all he had completed 605 hours flying time.
George Bielek, Flying Instructor: "He was a good man. Now, we never had problem with, with him and - he was a very serious and a quiet and er, he, he make you, his job very good in, in, in er, in flight. He was a good private pilot, serious, and er, he, he's looking for progressing each time."
Woman's Day Interview with Chloe Papazahariakis and Vlad Borovac Extracts:
- As they neared the Ritz, however, Chloe spotted the crowd of paparazzi ... She then turns the (video) camera on about 30 photographers - and unwittingly gets a side shot of a white, older-model Fiat Uno parked just outside the Ritz.
- Chloe and Vlad estimate it was 11.50 pm when bedlam broke out ... Attracted by the squeal of tyres, Chloe spins her camera in time to catch the Fiat speeding flat out after the Mercedes and Range Rover, on the wrong side of the road, and the wrong way up a one-way street.
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
1c. The investigating judge believes that as he approached the tunnel, Henri Paul saw a slow moving white Fiat Uno.
He tried to get round it but clipped the side of the car, lost control and skidded in to the thirteenth pillar. The Fiat Uno then drove away.
2c. There's a slip road on the right hand side about to come in and join us, just at the mouth of the tunnel. Anything coming out of there, you're really in difficulties. Then you get this strange kick to the left, but even at this speed there's a bit of throwing over to the left and then to the right. You lurch across the road. If anything goes wrong. Disaster. There's no protection in terms of any guard rail. Anybody who just deviates from the road only has to go a couple of feet on to the curb and you've got a solid accident taking place.
3c. Professor Murray McKay, Car Crash Expert: "The record for that tunnel is 13 deaths before this accident took place last August in the last dozen years or so."
Sunday Mirror 21/09/1997 Nick Pisa and Tracy Schaverien Extracts:
- A French police source said: "When the car left the Ritz, Mr Rees-Jones wasn't wearing a safety belt. Furthermore, he wasn't wearing it as the car crossed the Place de la Concorde. "It was only just before the tunnel that he buckled it. This saved his life. Was it because of the car's high speed?"
- London-born Brenda Wells, 40, told police how she was forced off the road by a motorbike following Diana's Mercedes at high speed. Ms Wells also saw a dark-coloured car - possibly the Fiat Uno which has now become the focal point of the French probe into the crash. In her statement she claims: "After a party with my friends, I was returning to my home. A motorbike with two men forced me off the road. It was following a big car. Afterwards in the tunnel there were very strong lights like flashes. After that, a black car arrived. The big car had come off the road. I stopped and five or six motorbikes arrived and started taking photographs. They were crying: 'It's Diana'."
Eye Witness M. Levistre:
I'm in the middle of the tunnel, I can see the head-lights approaching, you can see the head-lights because it's dark, it's night time. You could see the head-lights of the car coming with the motorbike head-lights because you can distinguish between the head-lights of a motorbike and those of a car, and the motorbike was driving along side the car, well now we can say that it's a Mercedes. Well, anyway, the motorbike when it enters...when the Mercedes comes, it drives over the crown of the road to enter the tunnel. At that moment, the Mercedes...the motorbike... accelerates and you can see the acceleration of the motorbike because you can see the head-light rise up a bit. The bike is accelerating. I am halfway through the tunnel, inside, when the motorbike accelerates, cuts the Mercedes up.
As we were going down, a Mercedes turned up behind me flashing its lights at me, so I moved back over to let it pass and the car went past me very, very fast. Very, very fast, I can still remember the sound it made, and it was followed by a motorbike ten metres or so behind. At that moment there's a big white flash.
A massive white light I'm looking in the rear-view mirror, and it's then - at that moment- that I see the motorbike, and I think to myself, well I think lots of things...I think why the cutting up, why did the motorbike cut them up?
It was stronger than a photo flash, or else it was a massive photo flash.
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
So what was that blinding light, Monsieur Levistre claims he saw in the tunnel. In the demonstration you've just seen, the first flash was from a paparazzi camera. But Monsieur Levistre identified the much bigger flash, the second one and that came from this piece of kit.
Now this is an anti personnel device - quite legal to buy in the UK - and it sets off one enormously powerful flash of light. Shine this in somebody's eyes and they are stunned, blinded, disabled for several minutes. If you're driving a car when it happens, you'll almost certainly crash.
We bought our anti personnel flash light in the west end of London for just over £260. But there's another version of this piece of kit. It's not available to the public. It's infinitely more powerful and it's used by army special forces - including the British - around the world.
BBC News Online: UK Diana crash airbags puzzle February 5, 1998
Reports say that the magistrate investigating the crash that killed Princess Diana is looking into what role, if any, was played by the airbags of the Mercedes in which she was travelling. The airbags in the car had already deployed and deflated when the vehicle crashed, according to the French tabloid Parisien Libere.
Quoting from a medical report, the paper said the airbags could already have been deflated when the Mercedes hit the 13th pillar of a tunnel under the Place de l'Alma in central Paris on August 31 last year.
The newspaper said that Herve Stephan, the magistrate investigating the crash in which Diana, her lover Dodi al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul died, had ordered a probe into whether the airbags had been set off by a previous collision or by accident.
Update (September 22, 1997): Agence-France-Presse report
British lawyer Gary Hunter in a hotel room directly above the Alma tunnel witnessing a small black car fleeing at 60-70 mph from the tunnel, after his hearing the crash and looking out of his third floor hotel window. Significantly, he added that his impression was that the car was running from the scene and that it "looked quite sinister" to him.
According to news accounts, he also said, "the car was being shadowed by a second vehicle, a white Mercedes."
PARIS (AP) Last modified at 3:50 p.m. on Wednesday, December 31, 1997
A judicial source told The Associated Press earlier this month that a witness in late November described seeing a small white car stopped in front of the Mercedes, just after the crash. He said he saw a man standing outside the car, speaking on a cellular telephone, and soon after he saw two men who had been in the vehicle running quickly out of the tunnel.
Eye Witnesses: Tom Richardson and Joanna Luz, residents of San Diego, California.
American tourists, they were walking along the Seine River when they heard a noise "like an explosion." Immediately they ran into the tunnel to offer assistance and "saw someone jump out from the car."
"A man started running towards us telling us to go," Richardson said.
Eye Witness Francois Levy
He entered the tunnel from the Cours Albert 1er. ahead of Brenda Wells.
"I saw the car (Mercedes 280s) in the middle of the tunnel with a motorcycle on its left, pulling ahead and then swerving to the right directly in front of the car (the Mercedes). As the motorcycle swerved and before the car lost control, there was a flash of light. But then I was out of the tunnel and heard, but did not see, the impact."
Levy added that he saw a powerful bike with two men aboard exit the tunnel immediately after the crash.
WASHINGTON, Sept 19 (AFP)
Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris, may have been six-weeks pregnant at the time of the accident, Time magazine said in its latest issue. Time Reported that an emergency-service doctor told the magazine that an associate at the scene said Diana was drifting in and out of consciousness, and at one point saying she was six-weeks pregnant while making a rubbing gesture on her belly.
http://www.public-interest.co.uk/diana/disurvey.htm
at least six MI6 agents were stationed at the British Embassy in Paris during the weekend of the crash. One officer had already been detailed to shadow Diana after her arrival from Sardinia. MI5 and MI6 both kept files on Mohammed al Fayed and Dodi, but security chiefs had held meetings about the two men's relationship with Diana in the weeks before the crash.
"The secret services have been known to hire snoopers who act as paparazzi to spy on targets."
Evening of 31 August Ritz security cameras
One of the photographers is inside the lobby. As they arrive at the front door a second photographer steps in front of Diana and manages to take a picture before being grabbed and thrown out. A grim faced Diana then enters the hotel, followed by the bodyguard Kes Wingfield, her boy friend, a few steps behind Dodi and Trevor Rees-JonesTranscript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited June 1998 Extracts:
- Shortly afterwards, Henri Paul, parks his Mini outside the Ritz. It's just after 10 o'clock in Paris, 9 o'clock in London. Henri Paul, whose main job was acting Head of Security at the Ritz had been called on his mobile and came back in to work. One mystery - still unresolved is where he was during the evening, having left work just after 7 o'clock. Once inside, he drank two glasses of Ricard - an alcoholic aperitif - in the bar.
- A decoy vehicle would go to the front of the Ritz. Meanwhile they would escape by the back door. The Ritz security video shows their black Mercedes - supplied by a local hire company - being brought round for them.
- 19 minutes past 12. At the back of the Ritz, Diana and Dodi slip into the black Mercedes, Henri Paul takes over at the wheel. But the paparazzi monitor their every move and alert each other on mobile phones. Even the crowd knew what was going on. On the tourist video you can hear what is happening. "They're chasing Princess Diana!"
- This is where the journey began. The rear entrance to the Ritz there. The princess and Dodi joined Henri Paul the chauffeur and Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard and they set off down the rue Cambon, a narrow back street.
Henri Paul: Background
Claude Garrec: "All I can tell you is that he had contacts within the French and foreign intelligence services."
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extracts:
1.b. A former member of French intelligence has suggested to us that the security managers of major hotels are prime targets for recruitment - and the Ritz, with its glittering guest list of the rich and powerful would be of more interest than many.
2b. Apart from 2 accounts in a bank outside Paris, he also had 3 accounts and a safety deposit box here at the BNP in the Place Vendome, just opposite the Ritz. He also had another 3 bank accounts here at Barclays on the avenue de l'Opera - just a short walk from the Ritz. But that's not all. He also had one current and 4 deposit accounts here at the Caisse d'Epargne, just near the Louvre. In the 8 months before the crash, 40,000 francs - that's about £4,000 was paid in to an account here - on five separate occasions, each time in cash.
Richard Tomlinson: "I know Henri Paul worked for MI6." "I first came across Paul's name in 1992-93 in a dossier when I was investigating an arms dealer. There was reference to a meeting with Harrod's owner Mohammed Al Fayed and a reference to Henri Paul as a minor MI6 asset." "Paul would give MI6 guys access to hotel rooms to plant bugs..."
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
Just two days before the accident he completed a rigorous medical to renew his flying licence. The medical found no signs of alcoholism. For him, flying wasn't just a hobby. His flight logs show he was a regular flier and he'd taken courses for flying at night. And in all he had completed 605 hours flying time.
George Bielek, Flying Instructor: "He was a good man. Now, we never had problem with, with him and - he was a very serious and a quiet and er, he, he make you, his job very good in, in, in er, in flight. He was a good private pilot, serious, and er, he, he's looking for progressing each time."
Woman's Day Interview with Chloe Papazahariakis and Vlad Borovac Extracts:
- As they neared the Ritz, however, Chloe spotted the crowd of paparazzi ... She then turns the (video) camera on about 30 photographers - and unwittingly gets a side shot of a white, older-model Fiat Uno parked just outside the Ritz.
- Chloe and Vlad estimate it was 11.50 pm when bedlam broke out ... Attracted by the squeal of tyres, Chloe spins her camera in time to catch the Fiat speeding flat out after the Mercedes and Range Rover, on the wrong side of the road, and the wrong way up a one-way street.
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
1c. The investigating judge believes that as he approached the tunnel, Henri Paul saw a slow moving white Fiat Uno.
He tried to get round it but clipped the side of the car, lost control and skidded in to the thirteenth pillar. The Fiat Uno then drove away.
2c. There's a slip road on the right hand side about to come in and join us, just at the mouth of the tunnel. Anything coming out of there, you're really in difficulties. Then you get this strange kick to the left, but even at this speed there's a bit of throwing over to the left and then to the right. You lurch across the road. If anything goes wrong. Disaster. There's no protection in terms of any guard rail. Anybody who just deviates from the road only has to go a couple of feet on to the curb and you've got a solid accident taking place.
3c. Professor Murray McKay, Car Crash Expert: "The record for that tunnel is 13 deaths before this accident took place last August in the last dozen years or so."
Sunday Mirror 21/09/1997 Nick Pisa and Tracy Schaverien Extracts:
- A French police source said: "When the car left the Ritz, Mr Rees-Jones wasn't wearing a safety belt. Furthermore, he wasn't wearing it as the car crossed the Place de la Concorde. "It was only just before the tunnel that he buckled it. This saved his life. Was it because of the car's high speed?"
- London-born Brenda Wells, 40, told police how she was forced off the road by a motorbike following Diana's Mercedes at high speed. Ms Wells also saw a dark-coloured car - possibly the Fiat Uno which has now become the focal point of the French probe into the crash. In her statement she claims: "After a party with my friends, I was returning to my home. A motorbike with two men forced me off the road. It was following a big car. Afterwards in the tunnel there were very strong lights like flashes. After that, a black car arrived. The big car had come off the road. I stopped and five or six motorbikes arrived and started taking photographs. They were crying: 'It's Diana'."
Eye Witness M. Levistre:
I'm in the middle of the tunnel, I can see the head-lights approaching, you can see the head-lights because it's dark, it's night time. You could see the head-lights of the car coming with the motorbike head-lights because you can distinguish between the head-lights of a motorbike and those of a car, and the motorbike was driving along side the car, well now we can say that it's a Mercedes. Well, anyway, the motorbike when it enters...when the Mercedes comes, it drives over the crown of the road to enter the tunnel. At that moment, the Mercedes...the motorbike... accelerates and you can see the acceleration of the motorbike because you can see the head-light rise up a bit. The bike is accelerating. I am halfway through the tunnel, inside, when the motorbike accelerates, cuts the Mercedes up.
As we were going down, a Mercedes turned up behind me flashing its lights at me, so I moved back over to let it pass and the car went past me very, very fast. Very, very fast, I can still remember the sound it made, and it was followed by a motorbike ten metres or so behind. At that moment there's a big white flash.
A massive white light I'm looking in the rear-view mirror, and it's then - at that moment- that I see the motorbike, and I think to myself, well I think lots of things...I think why the cutting up, why did the motorbike cut them up?
It was stronger than a photo flash, or else it was a massive photo flash.
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
So what was that blinding light, Monsieur Levistre claims he saw in the tunnel. In the demonstration you've just seen, the first flash was from a paparazzi camera. But Monsieur Levistre identified the much bigger flash, the second one and that came from this piece of kit.
Now this is an anti personnel device - quite legal to buy in the UK - and it sets off one enormously powerful flash of light. Shine this in somebody's eyes and they are stunned, blinded, disabled for several minutes. If you're driving a car when it happens, you'll almost certainly crash.
We bought our anti personnel flash light in the west end of London for just over £260. But there's another version of this piece of kit. It's not available to the public. It's infinitely more powerful and it's used by army special forces - including the British - around the world.
BBC News Online: UK Diana crash airbags puzzle February 5, 1998
Reports say that the magistrate investigating the crash that killed Princess Diana is looking into what role, if any, was played by the airbags of the Mercedes in which she was travelling. The airbags in the car had already deployed and deflated when the vehicle crashed, according to the French tabloid Parisien Libere.
Quoting from a medical report, the paper said the airbags could already have been deflated when the Mercedes hit the 13th pillar of a tunnel under the Place de l'Alma in central Paris on August 31 last year.
The newspaper said that Herve Stephan, the magistrate investigating the crash in which Diana, her lover Dodi al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul died, had ordered a probe into whether the airbags had been set off by a previous collision or by accident.
Update (September 22, 1997): Agence-France-Presse report
British lawyer Gary Hunter in a hotel room directly above the Alma tunnel witnessing a small black car fleeing at 60-70 mph from the tunnel, after his hearing the crash and looking out of his third floor hotel window. Significantly, he added that his impression was that the car was running from the scene and that it "looked quite sinister" to him.
According to news accounts, he also said, "the car was being shadowed by a second vehicle, a white Mercedes."
PARIS (AP) Last modified at 3:50 p.m. on Wednesday, December 31, 1997
A judicial source told The Associated Press earlier this month that a witness in late November described seeing a small white car stopped in front of the Mercedes, just after the crash. He said he saw a man standing outside the car, speaking on a cellular telephone, and soon after he saw two men who had been in the vehicle running quickly out of the tunnel.
Eye Witnesses: Tom Richardson and Joanna Luz, residents of San Diego, California.
American tourists, they were walking along the Seine River when they heard a noise "like an explosion." Immediately they ran into the tunnel to offer assistance and "saw someone jump out from the car."
"A man started running towards us telling us to go," Richardson said.
Eye Witness Francois Levy
He entered the tunnel from the Cours Albert 1er. ahead of Brenda Wells.
"I saw the car (Mercedes 280s) in the middle of the tunnel with a motorcycle on its left, pulling ahead and then swerving to the right directly in front of the car (the Mercedes). As the motorcycle swerved and before the car lost control, there was a flash of light. But then I was out of the tunnel and heard, but did not see, the impact."
Levy added that he saw a powerful bike with two men aboard exit the tunnel immediately after the crash.
WASHINGTON, Sept 19 (AFP)
Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris, may have been six-weeks pregnant at the time of the accident, Time magazine said in its latest issue. Time Reported that an emergency-service doctor told the magazine that an associate at the scene said Diana was drifting in and out of consciousness, and at one point saying she was six-weeks pregnant while making a rubbing gesture on her belly.
http://www.public-interest.co.uk/diana/disurvey.htm
Claude Garrec: "All I can tell you is that he had contacts within the French and foreign intelligence services."
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extracts:
1.b. A former member of French intelligence has suggested to us that the security managers of major hotels are prime targets for recruitment - and the Ritz, with its glittering guest list of the rich and powerful would be of more interest than many.
2b. Apart from 2 accounts in a bank outside Paris, he also had 3 accounts and a safety deposit box here at the BNP in the Place Vendome, just opposite the Ritz. He also had another 3 bank accounts here at Barclays on the avenue de l'Opera - just a short walk from the Ritz. But that's not all. He also had one current and 4 deposit accounts here at the Caisse d'Epargne, just near the Louvre. In the 8 months before the crash, 40,000 francs - that's about £4,000 was paid in to an account here - on five separate occasions, each time in cash.
Richard Tomlinson: "I know Henri Paul worked for MI6." "I first came across Paul's name in 1992-93 in a dossier when I was investigating an arms dealer. There was reference to a meeting with Harrod's owner Mohammed Al Fayed and a reference to Henri Paul as a minor MI6 asset." "Paul would give MI6 guys access to hotel rooms to plant bugs..."
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
Just two days before the accident he completed a rigorous medical to renew his flying licence. The medical found no signs of alcoholism. For him, flying wasn't just a hobby. His flight logs show he was a regular flier and he'd taken courses for flying at night. And in all he had completed 605 hours flying time.
George Bielek, Flying Instructor: "He was a good man. Now, we never had problem with, with him and - he was a very serious and a quiet and er, he, he make you, his job very good in, in, in er, in flight. He was a good private pilot, serious, and er, he, he's looking for progressing each time."
Woman's Day Interview with Chloe Papazahariakis and Vlad Borovac Extracts:
- As they neared the Ritz, however, Chloe spotted the crowd of paparazzi ... She then turns the (video) camera on about 30 photographers - and unwittingly gets a side shot of a white, older-model Fiat Uno parked just outside the Ritz.
- Chloe and Vlad estimate it was 11.50 pm when bedlam broke out ... Attracted by the squeal of tyres, Chloe spins her camera in time to catch the Fiat speeding flat out after the Mercedes and Range Rover, on the wrong side of the road, and the wrong way up a one-way street.
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
1c. The investigating judge believes that as he approached the tunnel, Henri Paul saw a slow moving white Fiat Uno.
He tried to get round it but clipped the side of the car, lost control and skidded in to the thirteenth pillar. The Fiat Uno then drove away.
2c. There's a slip road on the right hand side about to come in and join us, just at the mouth of the tunnel. Anything coming out of there, you're really in difficulties. Then you get this strange kick to the left, but even at this speed there's a bit of throwing over to the left and then to the right. You lurch across the road. If anything goes wrong. Disaster. There's no protection in terms of any guard rail. Anybody who just deviates from the road only has to go a couple of feet on to the curb and you've got a solid accident taking place.
3c. Professor Murray McKay, Car Crash Expert: "The record for that tunnel is 13 deaths before this accident took place last August in the last dozen years or so."
Sunday Mirror 21/09/1997 Nick Pisa and Tracy Schaverien Extracts:
- A French police source said: "When the car left the Ritz, Mr Rees-Jones wasn't wearing a safety belt. Furthermore, he wasn't wearing it as the car crossed the Place de la Concorde. "It was only just before the tunnel that he buckled it. This saved his life. Was it because of the car's high speed?"
- London-born Brenda Wells, 40, told police how she was forced off the road by a motorbike following Diana's Mercedes at high speed. Ms Wells also saw a dark-coloured car - possibly the Fiat Uno which has now become the focal point of the French probe into the crash. In her statement she claims: "After a party with my friends, I was returning to my home. A motorbike with two men forced me off the road. It was following a big car. Afterwards in the tunnel there were very strong lights like flashes. After that, a black car arrived. The big car had come off the road. I stopped and five or six motorbikes arrived and started taking photographs. They were crying: 'It's Diana'."
Eye Witness M. Levistre:
I'm in the middle of the tunnel, I can see the head-lights approaching, you can see the head-lights because it's dark, it's night time. You could see the head-lights of the car coming with the motorbike head-lights because you can distinguish between the head-lights of a motorbike and those of a car, and the motorbike was driving along side the car, well now we can say that it's a Mercedes. Well, anyway, the motorbike when it enters...when the Mercedes comes, it drives over the crown of the road to enter the tunnel. At that moment, the Mercedes...the motorbike... accelerates and you can see the acceleration of the motorbike because you can see the head-light rise up a bit. The bike is accelerating. I am halfway through the tunnel, inside, when the motorbike accelerates, cuts the Mercedes up.
As we were going down, a Mercedes turned up behind me flashing its lights at me, so I moved back over to let it pass and the car went past me very, very fast. Very, very fast, I can still remember the sound it made, and it was followed by a motorbike ten metres or so behind. At that moment there's a big white flash.
A massive white light I'm looking in the rear-view mirror, and it's then - at that moment- that I see the motorbike, and I think to myself, well I think lots of things...I think why the cutting up, why did the motorbike cut them up?
It was stronger than a photo flash, or else it was a massive photo flash.
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
So what was that blinding light, Monsieur Levistre claims he saw in the tunnel. In the demonstration you've just seen, the first flash was from a paparazzi camera. But Monsieur Levistre identified the much bigger flash, the second one and that came from this piece of kit.
Now this is an anti personnel device - quite legal to buy in the UK - and it sets off one enormously powerful flash of light. Shine this in somebody's eyes and they are stunned, blinded, disabled for several minutes. If you're driving a car when it happens, you'll almost certainly crash.
We bought our anti personnel flash light in the west end of London for just over £260. But there's another version of this piece of kit. It's not available to the public. It's infinitely more powerful and it's used by army special forces - including the British - around the world.
BBC News Online: UK Diana crash airbags puzzle February 5, 1998
Reports say that the magistrate investigating the crash that killed Princess Diana is looking into what role, if any, was played by the airbags of the Mercedes in which she was travelling. The airbags in the car had already deployed and deflated when the vehicle crashed, according to the French tabloid Parisien Libere.
Quoting from a medical report, the paper said the airbags could already have been deflated when the Mercedes hit the 13th pillar of a tunnel under the Place de l'Alma in central Paris on August 31 last year.
The newspaper said that Herve Stephan, the magistrate investigating the crash in which Diana, her lover Dodi al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul died, had ordered a probe into whether the airbags had been set off by a previous collision or by accident.
Update (September 22, 1997): Agence-France-Presse report
British lawyer Gary Hunter in a hotel room directly above the Alma tunnel witnessing a small black car fleeing at 60-70 mph from the tunnel, after his hearing the crash and looking out of his third floor hotel window. Significantly, he added that his impression was that the car was running from the scene and that it "looked quite sinister" to him.
According to news accounts, he also said, "the car was being shadowed by a second vehicle, a white Mercedes."
PARIS (AP) Last modified at 3:50 p.m. on Wednesday, December 31, 1997
A judicial source told The Associated Press earlier this month that a witness in late November described seeing a small white car stopped in front of the Mercedes, just after the crash. He said he saw a man standing outside the car, speaking on a cellular telephone, and soon after he saw two men who had been in the vehicle running quickly out of the tunnel.
Eye Witnesses: Tom Richardson and Joanna Luz, residents of San Diego, California.
American tourists, they were walking along the Seine River when they heard a noise "like an explosion." Immediately they ran into the tunnel to offer assistance and "saw someone jump out from the car."
"A man started running towards us telling us to go," Richardson said.
Eye Witness Francois Levy
He entered the tunnel from the Cours Albert 1er. ahead of Brenda Wells.
"I saw the car (Mercedes 280s) in the middle of the tunnel with a motorcycle on its left, pulling ahead and then swerving to the right directly in front of the car (the Mercedes). As the motorcycle swerved and before the car lost control, there was a flash of light. But then I was out of the tunnel and heard, but did not see, the impact."
Levy added that he saw a powerful bike with two men aboard exit the tunnel immediately after the crash.
WASHINGTON, Sept 19 (AFP)
Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris, may have been six-weeks pregnant at the time of the accident, Time magazine said in its latest issue. Time Reported that an emergency-service doctor told the magazine that an associate at the scene said Diana was drifting in and out of consciousness, and at one point saying she was six-weeks pregnant while making a rubbing gesture on her belly.
http://www.public-interest.co.uk/diana/disurvey.htm
- A French police source said: "When the car left the Ritz, Mr Rees-Jones wasn't wearing a safety belt. Furthermore, he wasn't wearing it as the car crossed the Place de la Concorde. "It was only just before the tunnel that he buckled it. This saved his life. Was it because of the car's high speed?"
- London-born Brenda Wells, 40, told police how she was forced off the road by a motorbike following Diana's Mercedes at high speed. Ms Wells also saw a dark-coloured car - possibly the Fiat Uno which has now become the focal point of the French probe into the crash. In her statement she claims: "After a party with my friends, I was returning to my home. A motorbike with two men forced me off the road. It was following a big car. Afterwards in the tunnel there were very strong lights like flashes. After that, a black car arrived. The big car had come off the road. I stopped and five or six motorbikes arrived and started taking photographs. They were crying: 'It's Diana'."
Eye Witness M. Levistre:
I'm in the middle of the tunnel, I can see the head-lights approaching, you can see the head-lights because it's dark, it's night time. You could see the head-lights of the car coming with the motorbike head-lights because you can distinguish between the head-lights of a motorbike and those of a car, and the motorbike was driving along side the car, well now we can say that it's a Mercedes. Well, anyway, the motorbike when it enters...when the Mercedes comes, it drives over the crown of the road to enter the tunnel. At that moment, the Mercedes...the motorbike... accelerates and you can see the acceleration of the motorbike because you can see the head-light rise up a bit. The bike is accelerating. I am halfway through the tunnel, inside, when the motorbike accelerates, cuts the Mercedes up.
As we were going down, a Mercedes turned up behind me flashing its lights at me, so I moved back over to let it pass and the car went past me very, very fast. Very, very fast, I can still remember the sound it made, and it was followed by a motorbike ten metres or so behind. At that moment there's a big white flash.
A massive white light I'm looking in the rear-view mirror, and it's then - at that moment- that I see the motorbike, and I think to myself, well I think lots of things...I think why the cutting up, why did the motorbike cut them up?
It was stronger than a photo flash, or else it was a massive photo flash.
Transcript embargoed until transmission June 3 1998 Copyright Fulcrum Productions Limited
June 1998 Extract:
So what was that blinding light, Monsieur Levistre claims he saw in the tunnel. In the demonstration you've just seen, the first flash was from a paparazzi camera. But Monsieur Levistre identified the much bigger flash, the second one and that came from this piece of kit.
Now this is an anti personnel device - quite legal to buy in the UK - and it sets off one enormously powerful flash of light. Shine this in somebody's eyes and they are stunned, blinded, disabled for several minutes. If you're driving a car when it happens, you'll almost certainly crash.
We bought our anti personnel flash light in the west end of London for just over £260. But there's another version of this piece of kit. It's not available to the public. It's infinitely more powerful and it's used by army special forces - including the British - around the world.
BBC News Online: UK Diana crash airbags puzzle February 5, 1998
Reports say that the magistrate investigating the crash that killed Princess Diana is looking into what role, if any, was played by the airbags of the Mercedes in which she was travelling. The airbags in the car had already deployed and deflated when the vehicle crashed, according to the French tabloid Parisien Libere.
Quoting from a medical report, the paper said the airbags could already have been deflated when the Mercedes hit the 13th pillar of a tunnel under the Place de l'Alma in central Paris on August 31 last year.
The newspaper said that Herve Stephan, the magistrate investigating the crash in which Diana, her lover Dodi al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul died, had ordered a probe into whether the airbags had been set off by a previous collision or by accident.
Update (September 22, 1997): Agence-France-Presse report
British lawyer Gary Hunter in a hotel room directly above the Alma tunnel witnessing a small black car fleeing at 60-70 mph from the tunnel, after his hearing the crash and looking out of his third floor hotel window. Significantly, he added that his impression was that the car was running from the scene and that it "looked quite sinister" to him.
According to news accounts, he also said, "the car was being shadowed by a second vehicle, a white Mercedes."
PARIS (AP) Last modified at 3:50 p.m. on Wednesday, December 31, 1997
A judicial source told The Associated Press earlier this month that a witness in late November described seeing a small white car stopped in front of the Mercedes, just after the crash. He said he saw a man standing outside the car, speaking on a cellular telephone, and soon after he saw two men who had been in the vehicle running quickly out of the tunnel.
Eye Witnesses: Tom Richardson and Joanna Luz, residents of San Diego, California.
American tourists, they were walking along the Seine River when they heard a noise "like an explosion." Immediately they ran into the tunnel to offer assistance and "saw someone jump out from the car."
"A man started running towards us telling us to go," Richardson said.
Eye Witness Francois Levy
He entered the tunnel from the Cours Albert 1er. ahead of Brenda Wells.
"I saw the car (Mercedes 280s) in the middle of the tunnel with a motorcycle on its left, pulling ahead and then swerving to the right directly in front of the car (the Mercedes). As the motorcycle swerved and before the car lost control, there was a flash of light. But then I was out of the tunnel and heard, but did not see, the impact."
Levy added that he saw a powerful bike with two men aboard exit the tunnel immediately after the crash.
WASHINGTON, Sept 19 (AFP)
Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris, may have been six-weeks pregnant at the time of the accident, Time magazine said in its latest issue. Time Reported that an emergency-service doctor told the magazine that an associate at the scene said Diana was drifting in and out of consciousness, and at one point saying she was six-weeks pregnant while making a rubbing gesture on her belly.
http://www.public-interest.co.uk/diana/disurvey.htm
Reports say that the magistrate investigating the crash that killed Princess Diana is looking into what role, if any, was played by the airbags of the Mercedes in which she was travelling. The airbags in the car had already deployed and deflated when the vehicle crashed, according to the French tabloid Parisien Libere.
Quoting from a medical report, the paper said the airbags could already have been deflated when the Mercedes hit the 13th pillar of a tunnel under the Place de l'Alma in central Paris on August 31 last year.
The newspaper said that Herve Stephan, the magistrate investigating the crash in which Diana, her lover Dodi al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul died, had ordered a probe into whether the airbags had been set off by a previous collision or by accident.
Update (September 22, 1997): Agence-France-Presse report
British lawyer Gary Hunter in a hotel room directly above the Alma tunnel witnessing a small black car fleeing at 60-70 mph from the tunnel, after his hearing the crash and looking out of his third floor hotel window. Significantly, he added that his impression was that the car was running from the scene and that it "looked quite sinister" to him.
According to news accounts, he also said, "the car was being shadowed by a second vehicle, a white Mercedes."
PARIS (AP) Last modified at 3:50 p.m. on Wednesday, December 31, 1997
A judicial source told The Associated Press earlier this month that a witness in late November described seeing a small white car stopped in front of the Mercedes, just after the crash. He said he saw a man standing outside the car, speaking on a cellular telephone, and soon after he saw two men who had been in the vehicle running quickly out of the tunnel.
Eye Witnesses: Tom Richardson and Joanna Luz, residents of San Diego, California.
American tourists, they were walking along the Seine River when they heard a noise "like an explosion." Immediately they ran into the tunnel to offer assistance and "saw someone jump out from the car."
"A man started running towards us telling us to go," Richardson said.
Eye Witness Francois Levy
He entered the tunnel from the Cours Albert 1er. ahead of Brenda Wells.
"I saw the car (Mercedes 280s) in the middle of the tunnel with a motorcycle on its left, pulling ahead and then swerving to the right directly in front of the car (the Mercedes). As the motorcycle swerved and before the car lost control, there was a flash of light. But then I was out of the tunnel and heard, but did not see, the impact."
Levy added that he saw a powerful bike with two men aboard exit the tunnel immediately after the crash.
WASHINGTON, Sept 19 (AFP)
Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris, may have been six-weeks pregnant at the time of the accident, Time magazine said in its latest issue. Time Reported that an emergency-service doctor told the magazine that an associate at the scene said Diana was drifting in and out of consciousness, and at one point saying she was six-weeks pregnant while making a rubbing gesture on her belly.
http://www.public-interest.co.uk/diana/disurvey.htm
A judicial source told The Associated Press earlier this month that a witness in late November described seeing a small white car stopped in front of the Mercedes, just after the crash. He said he saw a man standing outside the car, speaking on a cellular telephone, and soon after he saw two men who had been in the vehicle running quickly out of the tunnel.
Eye Witnesses: Tom Richardson and Joanna Luz, residents of San Diego, California.
American tourists, they were walking along the Seine River when they heard a noise "like an explosion." Immediately they ran into the tunnel to offer assistance and "saw someone jump out from the car.""A man started running towards us telling us to go," Richardson said.
Eye Witness Francois Levy
He entered the tunnel from the Cours Albert 1er. ahead of Brenda Wells.
"I saw the car (Mercedes 280s) in the middle of the tunnel with a motorcycle on its left, pulling ahead and then swerving to the right directly in front of the car (the Mercedes). As the motorcycle swerved and before the car lost control, there was a flash of light. But then I was out of the tunnel and heard, but did not see, the impact."
Levy added that he saw a powerful bike with two men aboard exit the tunnel immediately after the crash.
WASHINGTON, Sept 19 (AFP)
Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris, may have been six-weeks pregnant at the time of the accident, Time magazine said in its latest issue. Time Reported that an emergency-service doctor told the magazine that an associate at the scene said Diana was drifting in and out of consciousness, and at one point saying she was six-weeks pregnant while making a rubbing gesture on her belly.
http://www.public-interest.co.uk/diana/disurvey.htm
Princess Diana, who died in a car crash in Paris, may have been six-weeks pregnant at the time of the accident, Time magazine said in its latest issue. Time Reported that an emergency-service doctor told the magazine that an associate at the scene said Diana was drifting in and out of consciousness, and at one point saying she was six-weeks pregnant while making a rubbing gesture on her belly.
http://www.public-interest.co.uk/diana/disurvey.htm
