Date: 1997
Location: Paris, France
The Conspirators: British MI6 Intelligence
The Victims: Princess Diana, Dodi Al-Fayed, Henri Paul, Trevor Rees-Jones
The British royal family is an institution, centuries old, that represents stability and ideals. But to some who take this to an extreme, a significant component of this stability is that the royal family has always consisted of only white Christians. When Princess Diana—who had divorced from Prince Charles the previous year—became secretly engaged to Dodi Al-Fayed, a Muslim of Egyptian descent, and was said to be carrying his child, some conspiracy theorists suspected that this diversity might be too much for the British government to bear. Therefore, they believe, she was murdered by a secret conspiracy cooked up by the intelligence agency MI6 to protect the purity of the royal family.
According to the theorists, while traveling by car from the Hôtel Ritz Paris to an apartment across town, Diana and Dodi were pursued by paparazzi. To prep for the murders, security cameras in the vicinity were disabled, Diana’s security forces were mysteriously not present, and a white Fiat Uno was dispatched by MI6 to run them off the road. Sure enough, as their Mercedes entered an underpass tunnel at high speed, it hit the Fiat and struck a pillar. The accident killed three of the four occupants in the car, including Diana and Dodi. The Fiat was never found.
When the government arrested several of the paparazzi who were on the scene, the conspiracy theorists claim that the government was using them as scapegoats to cover up their own involvement.
The deaths of Princess Diana and the others in the car with her were caused by a lack of seat belts and a drunk driver going too fast and losing control. She was not murdered by British intelligence agents.
Although Prince Charles and Princess Diana separated in 1992, they did not formally divorce until 1996. But by then it was clear they were both pursuing separate lives. Charles had been seeing Camilla Parker Bowles, with whom he had an on-again/off-again relationship both before and during his marriage to Diana. And Diana had been seeing Dodi Al-Fayed, son of the billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed.
About a year after the divorce, Diana and Dodi spent nine days aboard the Al-Fayed family’s yacht, the Jonikal, off the French and Italian Rivieras. They then went to the family’s hotel in Paris, the Hôtel Ritz Paris. They dined late and then decided to head to a family-owned apartment across town.
Diana and Dodi were in the back seat of the Mercedes S-Class sedan, which was driven by Henri Paul, deputy head of hotel security. Riding shotgun was Trevor Rees-Jones, a former paratrooper and personal bodyguard to Dodi. Diana had no security of her own. None of them were wearing seat belts, and the driver, Paul, was drunk.
The relationship between the British royals and paparazzi photographers has often been a contentious one. The paparazzi’s reputation has often been to intrusively pursue the royals almost to the point of harassment, and the usual response from the royals has been to try and get out of their eye. On this night, Paul drove faster and faster to get away from the paparazzi that were chasing them. Going down a ramp to enter an underpass tunnel at approximately 60 mph, Paul swerved to avoid a slower white Fiat Uno, but grazed it. As a result of the hit the Mercedes began to fishtail and Paul lost control. The car hit a concrete support pillar head-on, nearly splitting in half. It spun and slammed to a stop against a wall.
Dodi and Paul were killed outright. Rees-Jones (who had put on a seat belt a few moments before the crash) was unconscious with severe facial and head injuries. Diana lay fatally injured on the floor in the back. Most of the paparazzi stopped. Although some took photos, others rendered what aid they could. When authorities arrived minutes later, seven of the paparazzi were arrested. Diana was conscious, but she died three and a half hours later. Unusually, the hospital embalmed Diana’s body that same day.
Very soon after the deaths, Dodi’s bereaved and outraged father revealed that the couple had been just about to announce their engagement and were expecting a baby (a claim that the embalming made impossible to verify). He began asking questions and leveling charges against the government. Why were there no security videos of what happened? Why was her body embalmed, if not to hide her pregnancy by a Muslim man? Where were Diana’s private security personnel? And why had the government not found this mysterious white Fiat?
By 2004 Mohamed Al-Fayed had made so many claims of a murder conspiracy that the Metropolitan Police were compelled to form Operation Paget, a special investigation unit, to look into the matter. Their report ran 832 pages divided into sixteen chapters. It investigated 175 separate charges made by Mohamed, and each was found to be without any evidence. Let’s take a look.
For starters, Diana had no security personnel of her own by choice. She disliked them and, once she divorced Prince Charles, she wasn’t required to have them. The Al-Fayed family had their own private security team and that was enough for her. On the evening of her death, Henri Paul and Trevor Rees-Jones were the security. So she had exactly as much security as she wanted.
The lack of security camera video of the crash turned out to be unfortunate but not mysterious. There were a good number of private security cameras along the route, and police looked at all of them, but they showed mainly building entrances, not the streets the Mercedes took. There was, however, a single video camera mounted above the entrance to the tunnel, and this camera should have been able to capture the actual moment when the Mercedes and the Fiat came together. Unfortunately, this camera only monitored live traffic and didn’t record the feed. The accident would have been witnessed live by somebody in the traffic office, but the office had closed more than an hour before the accident, so there was nobody to see whatever may have been visible on the screen.
The embalming of Diana’s body was, indeed, improper for the hospital to have done because she should have had a postmortem examination, and embalming made that impossible. If Diana’s death had been caused by anything suspicious, the embalming procedure almost certainly would have erased any traces, so Mohamed was well justified in questioning this. However, the French police ordered the hospital to do it because they knew French president Jacques Chirac would be viewing the body. Although the embalming could possibly have erased evidence, it doesn’t prove that any such evidence ever existed in the first place.
And what about that mysterious white Fiat Uno that was never found? Authorities only knew that it had existed at all because of reports from the witnessing paparazzi and from the paint that it left on the Mercedes wreck. The paint was a commercial white paint called Bianco Corfu, numbered either 210 or 224, which had only been used on Fiat Uno cars manufactured between 1983 and 1987. A massive dragnet by French police examined roughly 2,000 cars with this paint, but none of them were a match. Every so often a new claim about a white Fiat Uno comes out in the news, but the car involved in the crash has never been found. Certainly MI6 had the resources to permanently disappear a Fiat, but there’s no evidence they did so.
Also, even if MI6 had indeed chosen to kill Diana, using a Fiat Uno as the murder weapon was a horrible plan. Having a compact, lightweight Fiat bump a much heavier Mercedes S-Class (one of the safest cars in the world) is pretty far away from being a sure-thing assassination.
When all is said and done, Diana’s was a tragic death, but an accidental one, according to all the evidence. Henri Paul was drunk and driving too fast, which is precisely what the Operation Paget report found. Any other wild claims are just false conspiracy theories.