Princess Diana Murder
Cover-Up Turns Deadly

by Jeffrey Steinberg

Nearly three years after the Paris car crash that claimed the lives of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, the cover-up of that tragedy has taken a deadly turn, prompting some experts to recall the pileup of corpses that followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Over the course of four years, after President Kennedy was shot on Nov. 22, 1963, at least 37 eyewitnesses and other sources of evidence about the crime, including one member of the infamous Warren Commission, which oversaw the cover-up, died under mysterious circumstances. On May 5, 2000, police in the south of France found a badly burned body inside the wreckage of a car, deep in the woods near Nantes. The body was so charred that it took police nearly a month before DNA tests confirmed that the dead man was Jean-Paul "James" Andanson, a 54-year-old millionaire photographer, who was among the paparazzi stalking Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed during the week before their deaths. From the day of the fatal crash in the Place de l'Alma tunnel, that killed Diana, Dodi, and driver Henri Paul, and severely injured bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, Andanson had been at the center of the controversy. Mohamed Al-Fayed, the father of Dodi Fayed, and the owner of Harrods Department Store in London and the Paris Ritz Hotel, has labelled the Aug. 31, 1997 crash a murder, ordered by the British royal family, and most likely executed through agents and assets of the British secret intelligence service MI6--with collusion from French officials, whose cooperation in the cover-up would have been essential. At least seven eyewitnesses to the crash said that they saw a white Fiat Uno and a motorcycle speed out of the tunnel, seconds after the crash. Forensic tests have confirmed that a white Fiat Uno collided with the Mercedes carrying Diana and Dodi, and that this collision was a significant factor in the crash. Several eyewitnesses told police that they saw a powerful flash of light just seconds before the Mercedes swerved out of control and crashed into the 13th pillar of the Alma tunnel. That bright light--either a camera flash or a far more powerful flash of a laser weapon--was probably fired by the passenger on the back of the speeding motorcycle. Both the motorcycle and the white Fiat fled the crash scene, and police claim they have been unable to locate either vehicle, or identify the drivers or the passengers.

Andanson's White Fiat

Andanson had been in and around Sardinia during the last week of August 1997, as Diana and Dodi vacationed in the Mediterranean. He joined several dozen other paparazzi, who were stalking the couple's every move. He was back in France on Aug. 30, the day that Diana and Dodi flew to Paris. And that is where the facts about Andanson's activities and whereabouts get very fuzzy. For reasons that he never revealed, sometime before dawn on Aug. 31, 1997, less than six hours after the crash in the Alma tunnel, Andanson boarded a flight at Orly Airport near Paris, bound for Corsica. Andanson claimed that he was not in Paris earlier in the evening, when the crash occurred, but he never produced any evidence, save a receipt for the purchase of gasoline elsewhere in France (which he could have doctored or obtained from another person), to prove he was not in the city. His son James and his daughter Kimberly told police that they thought their father was grape-harvesting in the Bordeaux region. Andanson's wife Elizabeth claimed that she had been at home with her husband all night, at their country home, Le Manoir de la Bergerie, in Cher, until he abruptly left for Orly, at 3:45 a.m., to catch the crack-of-dawn flight to Corsica. Pressed on her version of the story, Mrs. Anderson later admitted to reporters and police that her husband was constantly on the run, and she could have been mistaken about the night in question. She told The Express, a British newspaper, "It was always very difficult to recall James's precise movements because he was always coming and going. The family was very used to that and so never paid a great deal of attention to the times he came and went." What makes Andanson's precise itinerary the night of the fatal crash so vital is this: He owned and drove a white Fiat Uno. The car was repainted shortly after the Aug. 31, 1997 Alma tunnel crash, and was sold by Andanson in October 1997. And, although the official report of the French authorities investigating the crash concluded that Andanson's car was not involved in the crash, French forensic reports made available to The Express told a very different story. One report in the files of Judge Hervé Stephan, the chief investigating magistrate in the Diana-Dodi crash probe, described the tests on Andanson's Fiat: "The comparative analysis of the infrared spectra characterizing the vehicle's original paint, reference Bianco 210, and the trace on the side-view mirror of the Mercedes shows that their absorption bands are identical." In laymen's terms, the paint scratches from the Fiat found on the side-view mirror of the Mercedes were identical to the paint samples taken from the matching spot on Andanson's Fiat. The report continued: "The comparative analysis between the infrared spectra characterizing the black polymer taken from the vehicle's fender, and the trace taken from the door of the Mercedes, show that their absorption bands are identical." In short, despite the French investigators' endorsement of Andanson's alibi, the forensic tests strongly suggested that his car may have been the white Fiat Uno involved in the fatal crash. John Macnamara, the Harrods director of security, and a retired senior Scotland Yard supervisor of investigations, told reporters: "Mr. Andanson had for some time been a prime suspect who had relentlessly pursued Diana and Dodi prior to their arrival in Paris. We have always believed that Andanson was at the scene and that more investigation should have been done into his possible involvement." Macnamara added, "We believe that his death is no coincidence and that this is a line of inquiry which may help to discover the truth. Was Mr. Andanson killed because of what he knew? That is a question we want answered."

Needless to say, Andanson's death stirred up renewed interest in Diana's death at a most inopportune time for the British royals, and those in France who abetted the cover-up. Sometime in September, an appellate court in Paris will rule on Al-Fayed's motion to order Judge Stephan to reopen the crash probe, based on the fact that Stephan shut down his probe before certain vital avenues of inquiry were fully explored, and in contradiction to his own interim report, which cited several glaring paradoxes in the evidence that remained unresolved at the point that he abruptly closed down his investigation last year and blamed the crash on driver Henri Paul. For example, U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, have all acknowledged, in response to Freedom of Information Act queries, that they have thousands of pages of documents on Princess Diana. Those documents, for the most part, remain under lock and key. In addition to those documents and other relevant evidence, it has been recently exposed that a secret U.S.-U.K. joint surveillance program, code-named "Project Echelon," had apparently been involved in round-the-clock monitoring of Princess Diana's telephone conversations, while she was at home in England and travelling around the globe. Until the contents of these U.S. government files and electronic intercepts have been reviewed by French investigators, Al-Fayed's lawyers have argued, the probe cannot be considered complete. And the U.S. Justice Department continues to stonewall on indicting three Americans who were involved in an attempted $20 million extortion of Al-Fayed in April 1998, centered around purported "CIA documents" proving that British intelligence assassinated Diana and Dodi. While the "CIA documents" seized from one of the plotters have been confirmed to have been clever forgeries, questions remain about the accuracy of the content of the documents. In a flagrant effort to dampen interest in the Andanson factor, the June 11 Mail on Sunday, a pro-royalist tabloid, ran a story proclaiming "Wife's Affair Led to Paparazzi Man's Car Blaze Suicide." The Mail on Sunday dutifully peddled the French government's cover story: "The millionaire photographer who trailed Diana, Princess of Wales in St. Tropez just days before her death, committed suicide when he discovered his wife was cheating on him, French police have revealed. . . . The eccentric millionaire--who was hailed by colleagues as one of the godfathers of paparazzi photography, and who flew a Union Flag over his house to show his love of Britain--was facing a family crisis at the time of his death." Mail on Sunday reporter Ian Sparks quoted an unnamed colleague of Andanson's at the Sipa Agency in Paris, making the preposterously contradictory claim that Andanson "was desperate to save his marriage. We would never have guessed he would do something so terrible." He committed suicide to save his marriage! Right. A French police spokesman told Sparks, "He took his own life by dousing himself and the car with petrol and then setting light to it." Andanson's widow Elizabeth, and their son James have rejected the idea that Andanson's death was suicide. Sources close to the family told EIR that they have pressed French officials to conduct a murder investigation into Andanson's death 400-miles from his home. The sources dismiss the bogus "marital problems" story and additionally report that Andanson was in high spirits over his new job with the Sipa Agency.

The Plot Thickens

Just after midnight on June 16, just one week after Andanson's death was first made public, three masked men armed with handguns, broke into the Sipa office in Paris, shooting a security guard in the foot. The three assailants dismantled all of the security cameras in the office, and proceeded to enter several specific offices, clearly aware of exactly what they were looking for. They made off with several cameras, laptop computers, and computer hard drives. Sipa's office employs more than 200 people, and operates 24-hours a day. The three invaders spent three hours in the office, holding other employees hostage. According to one of the hostages, the men were never concerned about the French police arriving at the scene. This hostage was convinced that the three "burglars" were themselves working for some branch of the French Secret Service. Furthermore, the source confirmed that Andanson had worked for French and, undoubtedly, British security agencies. The owner of Sipa, Sipa Hioglou, has worked closely with French intelligence, and, not surprisingly, has been one of the primary sources of the "marital problems/suicide" cover story about Andanson's death, "confessing" to French police and reporters that Andanson had confided in him that he planned to take his own life. Hioglou, in the days following the bizarre break-in and hostage siege of his office, also told police that he suspected that the raid was done on behalf of a disgruntled celebrity who was angry that her picture had been taken by a Sipa paparazzo without her permission. In stark contrast, other Sipa employees have told the police that the idea that Andanson committed suicide was preposterous, and that they suspect that the break-in was related to his death.

The Sipa raid, the obvious work of French Secret Service assets, raises some very troubling questions. If Macnamara and Al-Fayed are right, and Andanson was at the crash site on Aug. 31, 1997, and his white Fiat was the car that collided with the Mercedes, what documentation exists of his presence at the tunnel? What photographs exist of the crash scene, and what do they reveal? Was some of this material seized from the Sipa offices in the recent break-in, to assure that it never sees the light of day? Evidence has recently come to light, that within hours of the crash, British and French secret service agencies carried out a series of similar break-ins at the homes and offices of several photo-agency personnel, in a desperate search for photos of the crash site that may have been transmitted in the hours immediately after the Alma tunnel collision, and before word of Princess Diana's death was made public. EIR has obtained copies of sworn statements from two London-based photographers, Darryn Paul Lyons and Lionel Cherruault, which reveal that British intelligence was hyperactive in the hours immediately after the Alma tunnel crash, desperately seeking any revealing photographs that might have been spirited out of Paris. Lyons identified himself as the "Chairman of `Big Pictures,' . . . an international photographic agency in London, New York, and Sydney, specializing in obtaining and selling unique and exclusive celebrity-based photographs." At 12:30 a.m. on Aug. 31, 1997, Lyons received a phone call from a Paris paparazzo, Lorent Sola, who said that he had a dozen photographs of the accident at the Alma tunnel. Sola offered to electronically transmit the photos to Lyons immediately, and Lyons rushed off to his office, receiving the high-resolution photographs at approximately 3 a.m. Lyons immediately began negotiating with several large news organizations in the United States and Britain to sell the pictures for $250,000. Lyons and Sola conferred after word of Diana's death was made public, and they decided to withdraw the offer of the pictures. Copies of the photos were placed in Lyons' office safe. Sometime between 11 p.m. on Aug. 31 and 12:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, the electricity at Lyons' office was mysteriously cut, although no other power outages in the office building or the neighborhood occurred. Lyons, convinced that either the office was being robbed, or bombed, called the police. In his sworn statement, Lyons declared that he believed that secret service agents had broken into his office and either searched the premises or planted surveillance and listening devices. Lionel Cherruault, a London-based photo journalist for Sipa Agency, in his sworn statement, reported that, at 1:45 a.m. on Aug. 31, 1997, he received a call at his home from a freelance photographer in Florida, informing him that he was expecting to soon be in possession of photographs of the tunnel crash. Cherruault told the Florida contact that he was interested. After word of Diana's death was announced, the deal fell through. But Cherruault, who was in contact with his boss at Sipa, stated that, at approximately 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 1, while he and his wife and daughter were asleep, his home was broken into, his wife's car was stolen, and his car was moved. Computer disks used for transmitting photographs, and other electronic equipment, were stolen, and the front door of their home was left wide open. Even though cash, credit cards, and jewelry were visible in the study where the burglars stole the computer equipment, none of those valuables were taken, making it clear that this was not an ordinary break-in. The next day, a police officer came to Cherruault's home and confirmed that the break-in was clearly the work of "Special Branch, MI5, MI6, call it what you like, this was no ordinary burglary." The officer said that the home had "been targetted." The man, whose name Cherruault was unable to recall, assured him "not to worry, your lives were not in danger," according to the sworn statement. The official police report of the Cherruault break-in, which has been reviewed by EIR, confirmed that "The computer equipment stolen contained a huge library of royal photographs and appears to have been the main target for the perpetrators."

Another Thread of the Cover-Up

One of the other still-unresolved issues in the Alma crash probe, three years after the fact, revolves around the medical evidence. Al-Fayed has been battling in court in Britain for the right to participate in the official inquest into the death of Princess Diana, arguing that since both Diana and Dodi died in the crash, therefore he should be entitled to officially participate in both inquests. The courts have preliminarily ruled that he has the right to contest the Royal Coroner's rejection of his participation in the Diana inquest, which will only occur after the French appellate process has been completed, sometime later this year. However, in April of this year, the attorneys representing Al-Fayed received a copy of a suppressed memorandum, prepared by Professors Dominique Lecomte and Andre Lienhart, two French forensic pathologists working for Judge Stephan, suggesting that British authorities, including the Royal Coroner, Dr. Burton, had interceded to conceal some aspects of the official British autopsy. The two French doctors were in London on June 23, 1998, where they met with British coroners Drs. Burton and Burgess, forensic pathologist Dr. Chapman, and Scotland Yard Superintendant Jeffrey Rees. They were given copies of the English autopsy report on Princess Diana, but, according to their contemporaneous notes on the meeting, were told that the document was provided for their "private and personal use," and that it should not be included in the formal file of Judge Stephan. Any material in that official investigative file was automatically made available to attorneys representing all the interested parties in the French probe, including Al-Fayed's attorneys. This two-and-a-half year suppression of the Lecomte-Lienhart memorandum has once again raised serious questions about the legitimacy of the "official" autopsy of the Princess of Wales, including questions that arose at the time of her death, as to whether she was pregnant. The mayhem surrounding the deaths of Diana and Dodi, and now Andanson, raises questions about the circumstances in Paris on that night in late August 1997--questions that the House of Windsor in general, and Prince Philip in particular, have long sought to suppress. The time may be fast approaching that the well-orchestrated three-year cover-up is about to blow apart, and at least part of the truth about the death of the "People's Princess" see the light of day.

And that is something that the Windsors and the mandarins of MI6 may not be able to survive.

The Murder of Princess Diana by Noel Botham (Paperback - 28 Feb 2007) Buy new:  £7.99£3.99    28 Used & new from £1.00 You save: £4.00 (50%) Get it by Tuesday, Mar. 6, if you order in the next 14 minutes.

Battle of the Documentaries

The trigger for the slanders against LaRouche was the airing of the ITV documentary on the evening of June 3, followed by a live TV debate, which featured this author. The ITV documentary provided dramatic new evidence supporting the case that Diana and Dodi were murdered (see "New Holes in Cover-Up of Diana Murder Plot," EIR, June 12, 1998), and highlighted several investigative leads that were first published in EIR, including the possibility that driver Paul was blinded by an anti-personnel laser. During the live TV round-table debate, this author discussed Princess Diana's decade-long war with the House of Windsor, including the impact of her November 1995 BBC Panorama interview, in which she charged that her estranged husband, Prince Charles, was unfit to be King; and, the reaction of the establishment to her actions, which amounted to a collective shriek, "Off with her head!" Rowland's personal involvement in the campaign to cover up the truth about the Paris crash, and to destroy Mohamed Al Fayed, was also aired, much to the chagrin of the producer and host of a Channel 4 "Dispatches" documentary on the Diana death that aired the following night. Channel 4 tried to dismiss as fantasy every piece of evidence refuting the "drunk driver" theory.[FIGURE 2] The Channel 4 "Dispatches" program included a slander of this author and EIR that was even more explicit on the question of Prince Philip. Although this author was interviewed on camera for more than two hours by Channel 4 host Martyn Gregory, less than one minute of that interview was shown on the hour-long "Dispatches" diatribe. And, that brief segment waxed hysterical about EIR's refusal to "rule out" the possibility that Prince Philip ordered the murder of Diana and Dodi. Indeed, British press accounts of the relationship between Prince Philip and Lady Diana, particularly during the brief period of her relationship with Dodi Fayed, revealed that the Royal Consort was in a constant blind rage over Diana's public disdain for the Windsors, and particularly her implicit challenge to their legitimacy on the British throne. Gregory was given several pages in the Sunday Telegraph on June 7, to continue denouncing LaRouche, EIR, and Al Fayed. In an article regurgitating the "Dispatches" disinformation, Gregory wrote: "The numerous hares Mohamed Fayed has set running in the colours of sundry conspiracy theories are typified by Geoffrey [sic] Steinberg, chief reporter of Executive Intelligence Review, a small-circulation American magazine that specializes in conspiracy theories. He was yet another guest on the side of the motley crew supporting ITV's Wednesday night programme. "This is the man who told Dispatches he `could not rule out the possibility' that Prince Philip was involved in the `murder of Diana.' We decided not to take Steinberg seriously at all."

   Defending `Mr. Big'

Not so for MI5, another British intelligence agency. On June 10, Francis Wheen, a writer for MI5's favorite leak sheet, the political satire magazine Private Eye, penned another anti-LaRouche diatribe, in the London Guardian. Wheen, who had published smears against LaRouche in 1996, fixated on EIR's targetting of Prince Philip, whom Wheen affectionately referred to as "Mr. Big." "Many weird characters enjoyed their 15 minutes of fame during last week's flurry of TV programmes about Princess Diana," Wheen began, "but none was weirder than Jeffrey Steinberg, who appeared on Wednesday night's `studio debate' and again on Channel 4's Dispatches the next evening. There was, he admitted, `no smoking-gun proof' that Prince Philip ordered British intelligence to assassinate the Princess; nevertheless, `I can't rule it out in all honesty.' " Wheen complained, "So who is he? For some reason, viewers were not informed that the grand-sounding Executive Intelligence Review is in fact the weekly propaganda magazine of Lyndon H. LaRouche." Wheen almost got it right, when he noted, "Executive Intelligence Review has supported Al Fayed in his vendetta against Tiny Rowland and Lonrho; and when Michael Howard refused Al Fayed's application for British citizenship, LaRouche published a defamatory article about the family connection between Howard and Harold Landy, the former chairman of a Lonrho subsidiary." Wheen then digressed into the ID-format slander that was perfected by the mid-1980s dirty tricks slander salon, run by Wall Street Anglophile spook banker John Train, as part of the "Get LaRouche" task force of the U.S. Justice Department and private agencies that framed up and railroaded LaRouche to prison. Wheen recited the litany of smears: LaRouche says "the Queen runs an international cocaine smuggling cartel," that "Henry Kissinger is a communist agent," and, interestingly, that "the Italian banker Roberto Calvi was murdered by the Duke of Kent." (Calvi was himself a member of the extended royal family.)
 
International terrorism

Wheen then touched on another sore spot of the House of Windsor and Club of the Isles: the British hand in sponsoring and harboring international terrorism. He tried to twist EIR's exposé of London's role in safe-housing dozens of major terrorist organizations, a fact the U.S. State Department and the CIA have acknowledged in written documents. "In recent years," Wheen wrote, "LaRouche and Steinberg have been pursuing another `unique' theory--that `international terrorism' is masterminded by none other than Lord [William] Rees-Mogg and the Daily Telegraph reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.... LaRouche claims [that] Rees-Mogg and Evans-Pritchard are part of a `powerful London-centerd apparatus that declared war on the United States immediately after the inauguration of President Clinton.' Whitewater, Troopergate, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky--all these scandals can be traced back to our double-barreled desperadoes.... But Rees-Mogg and Evans-Pritchard are merely servants of the `powerful London-centered apparatus.' The Mr. Big whose orders they obey is Prince Philip.... The intention, according to LaRouche, is to discredit, and destabilise the U.S. until it is forced to become a British colony once again, thus taking the House of Windsor another giant stride on its road to world domination." Wheen continued, "Only one person in Britain was powerful enough to thwart the conspiracy--Princess Diana, who had `declared war' on the royal family in her Panorama interview. And so she had to be killed." Wheen ended on a curious, slightly ominous, note: "This alliance between Al Fayed and Lyndon LaRouche seems risky, to say the least. Why should a prominent public figure aid and abet such an unscrupulous fantasy-merchant? If LaRouche doesn't wish to sully his reputation, he must disown Al Fayed forthwith," Wheen wrote. A half-dozen other slanders followed the Guardian article, in the Scotsman, on BBC-4 Radio, and even in the Danish press. One factor that clearly got the royals' blood boiling was that, according to the major British TV rating service, 12.5 million Britons watched the ITV documentary, and most of them also watched the studio debate that followed the evening news. On June 4, German national television aired the entire ITV broadcast, and major German dailies published lengthy excerpts from the transcript. In contrast, fewer than 3 million British viewers watched the Channel 4 smear the following evening. And, a Mirror newspaper poll, published on June 7, suggested that an overwhelming majority of Britons are convinced that there was more to the death of Diana than a traffic accident.

The Strategic Battle

As EIR has said from day one, the death of Princess Diana is the scandal that could hasten the fall of the House of Windsor. But, the future of the Club of the Isles oligarchy hangs in the balance today in a number of ways. The probe in Paris of Diana's death, if it turns up compelling evidence of a murder, or even of aggravated manslaughter caused by a paparazzi mob notorious for its links to British intelligence and the Crown apparatus, would certainly bring down both the Windsors and the current Socialist government in France, which also is deeply implicated in the crash and the cover-up. On other fronts, the British establishment is torn over how to deal with the onrush of the financial collapse. Prince Philip and his circle have no compunctions about throwing the world into decades of chaos and genocide, in order to retain oligarchical control. But other, less insane forces within the City of London financial elite are apparently asking, "What do we get out of such chaos and destruction?" and may be seeking a new political alliance, perhaps with the United States, and sane forces on the continent who are opposed to the suicidal Maastricht Treaty. Other issues that are causing divisions among the British elites include Britain's stance on the European Monetary Union, and the euro single curency. Furthermore, factions on the continent that share Prince Philip's impulse to play "chaos warfare," may be pressing for a new assault on the Asian currencies, including the Japanese yen, through the major continental banks and their offshore hedge funds, even though such a move at this moment would almost certainly trigger a global financial explosion with unpredictable consequences. Within the extended European oligarchy, which has, for decades, been under the boot of Prince Philip's Club of the Isles, there is intensive in-fighting and factional warfare, adding further to the crisis atmosphere spreading across Eurasia. The common point of agreement among the "chaos" factions within the British and continental oligarchies, is that the power of the United States, as the pillar of the nation-state system, must be destroyed in the immediate period ahead, lest LaRouche's ideas for a nation-state-centered New Bretton Woods solution to the present global mess, be adopted, along with LaRouche's vision for a Eurasian Land-Bridge plan of global economic reconstructed.

New holes in cover-up of
Diana murder plot

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. .

Tampering with evidence

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.

Carbon monoxide found in Paul's blood

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.

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.

This article appears in the
June 19, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

This article appears in the July 7, 2000 issue
of Executive Intelligence Review.

This article appeared in the June 12, 1998 issue
 of Executive Intelligence Review.

The Murder of Princess Diana by Noel Botham (Paperback - 28 Feb 2007) Buy new:  £7.99£3.99    28 Used & new from £1.00 You save: £4.00 (50%) Get it by Tuesday, Mar. 6, if you order in the next 14 minutes.

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.

This article appears in the
June 19, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.