What Happened On The Night That Princess Diana Died? | August 31st | Real History

i feel this is the most dangerous phase in my life he's planning an accident in my car brake failure and serious head injury in order to make the path october 1996 princess diana predicted her own death in this letter to her butler paul burrell two weeks ago he released the letter blanking out the name of the person diana believed was plotting her murder the problem that the establishment will have is that they have covered up the inquest never been an inquest they have not allowed a public inquiry into what happened to dinah in this country and that has fueled already conspiracy theories for the last six years and what today's letter will do is simply give credence to the view that there was more to it than meets the eye and we should have some form of formal investigation there was an official french inquiry into the deaths of diana and dodie al-fayed an inquiry that ruled out foul play but six years on there's still been no inquest in britain the coroner's act states there has to be an inquest if bodies are brought back here for burial and that is what happened on august the 31st 1997 the act says the inquest has to be held as soon as practicable the tattler is the magazine of the rich and chic it's close to the establishment but its editor is now leading a campaign for that inquest why has the most famous woman possibly in the 20th century who died in mysterious circumstances not have what she's legally entitled to which is an inquest i mean it is an obligation under the law it's not a nicety it's not something which we might feel was polite or or decent to do it is a legal obligation at 20 minutes past midnight on the 31st of august 1997 princess diana and dodie alfayead set out from the ritz hotel in central paris and of the four people in her mercedes only the bodyguard trevor reese jones would survive two hours after the crash french police arrested seven paparazzi for manslaughter their high speed chase had caused the deaths thirty hours later the french authorities changed the story dramatically now the fault was the drivers ori paul was drunk and on medication following a french government inquiry in 1999 this explanation remains the official cause of the accident and the deaths of diana dodi and their driver but now we know that the official version is deeply flawed investigating magistrates and the prosecution wanted to come to an end because there was too much pressure because no one would know the real truth anyway so it had to be stopped so it was stopped and of course not everything has been acquired on we've been allowed to film the 27 volumes of confidential evidence the french inquiry gathered none of these documents have been seen before the files raise a number of very worrying questions about the inquiry why was the scene of the accident scrub clean and opened within four hours of the crash destroying valuable forensic evidence why was the traffic police investigation not included in the official inquiry report why was the first witness on the scene ignored and silenced by the police why was the autopsy carried out on ori paul so blatantly inaccurate and why were the secret service connections of both ori paul and another key witness never properly explored one of our discoveries was this photograph of the mercedes and its occupants taken just seconds before the crash many vital questions have never been properly pursued let alone answered and that appears to be no accident in july 1997 princess diana and her children spent two weeks in santro pay as guests of the al fayeds she was a free woman just divorced and just out of a two-year love affair [Music] three weeks later diana went back without her children to join the al fayed family on their new 12 million pound yacht the johnny cow during the cruise diana made very public her new romance with dodi al-fayed the couple gave great headlines [Music] princess of the paradox diana yo-yo'd between posing for stills and pleading for privacy [Music] on saturday the 30th of august diana dodie and bodyguard trevories jones flew by private plane from sardinia where the johnny cal had moored they were bound for paris where they were met at the airport by paparazzi including photographer fabrice chassery his pictures caught a moment in the first time the four people who would drive in the doomed mercedes ever met [Music] dodi was close to re paul deputy head of security at the ritz he is one of the key personalities of the night and a man with a complicated past honorary paul who was the second in charge of security the ritz hotel and was sort of press gang into being the chauffeur that night at the last minute he he was a long-standing agent for mi6 an agent in terms of supplying information to mi6 about the goings on in the ritz hotel in return for cash and he'd been working for mi6 since well i'd seen his file for the first time in 1992 and from memory he'd been working for mi6 for a few years prior to that the secret service connection was confirmed by ori paul's best friend claude garrick hotel [Music] the inquiry faced a politically sensitive issue deciding how much of ori paul's past it could reveal and this was not the only difficult decision ori paul accompanied diana and dodie to the villa windsor the mansion edward viii and mrs simpson had lived in in paris a property the al fired family had bought i think she was aware that she was a potential duchess of windsor a sort of loose cannon who they were going to watch very carefully and she was not averse to upsetting them and i think she quite enjoyed how much the affair with dodie would upset everybody back at buckingham palace as indeed it did and a bit of in-your-faceness was in her nature they drove to dodie's flat number one rue our san jose near the etowah dodie had booked a table at a smart parisian restaurant but at a quarter to 10 he cancelled because there was a crowd outside diana and dodi returned to the ritz the great hotel owned by dodi's father muhammad al fayed the couple ate in the restaurant she had seoul he had turbot and then they went up to the six thousand pound a night imperial suite previous occupants included hermann goering winston churchill and woody allen ori paul left work at seven pm two hours later he was asked to return to the ritz oripaul's ultimate boss at the ritz is also the owner of harrods in london muhammad al-fayed still ponders what happened that night dude called me it was about 12 o'clock he said just i'm going now to the apartment and he told me it's a lot of paparazzi i don't know what they do the plus one dome is full of people i told him please it's so dangerous just stay in a hotel everything is there no need for you to go out you told me i think i will follow your advice why after dodi assured me that he is not going to go out uh paul henry paul gone to him at 12 o'clock after dodi talking to me and convinced him no problem we're gonna go from the back entrance everything is okay don't worry i know the way and please you know because you have already prepared everything there change to this mind followed him up and he said because all the arrangements there they have the champagne they have the party they're in the airport hari paul part-time mi6 man would help dodie devise a plan to outwit the paparazzi this amateur video is the only record of what was happening outside at the front of the reds someone's out they're very important tourists and paparazzi wait for the glamorous couple ori paul tells the crowd the couple will be leaving soon in this their mercedes five minutes later the clever ploy a second mercedes pulls up by the back door of the ritz ori paul princess diana dodie and trevor reese jones get in paul takes the wheel meanwhile at the front of the ritz people scramble into their cars realizing they've been fooled using two mercedes might not be vintage james bond but it gave diana and dodie's car a head start chasing princess diana the quickest way from the ritz to dodie's flat was up the chanzalize but at the concord the car turned left instead of right it then raced along the riverbank of the sen it was now actually going away from dodie's flat but the french inquiry never asked why they were taking this route it is a mystery why they were where they were because there are many different ways of getting to the apartment that they were going to at the top of the champs-elysees without going via the champs-elysees where they were it's inexplicable our access to the files reveals that most witnesses did not see the actual crash because they were either at the entrance or the exit of the tunnel it's amazing that one crucial witness who was behind the mercedes was ignored by the inquiry his name is eric patel [Music] patel was not the only person to hear a strange noise clive gurovudu who was on the bridge above the alma tunnel he and also was a chauffeur and he was his car was parked and he was waiting for the people he was waiting for to come out of their restaurant or cinema or something and he was having a cigarette on on the bridge over the alma tunnel and he heard this this car coming towards him and and he heard a very loud noise and he his conclusion i think was that this the person driving that car had actually uh engaged neutral and then pressed the accelerator that was the the sound of a racing engine uh not in gear which he described foreign [Music] ori paul and dodie all fired died almost instantly [Music] foreign [Music] foreign patel went to this phone box and rang the emergency services then he went to the nearest police station he was badly shaken [Music] is princess diana was very badly hurt when she hit the back of trevor reese jones's seat but she was not trapped in the metal under a flash the full damage is clear at 20 to 1 in the morning paris chief constable pierre masoni was told of the crash he woke his boss the minister of the interior and then made for the tunnel princess diana was lifted out and put in one of the three ambulances that had arrived by 12 40. by 2 am police chief masoni and the french minister of the interior became worried because diana's ambulance had still not reached the hospital it stopped twice in fact first one kilometer from the tunnel and then on the bridge just 300 yards from the hospital the french press were told this was because diana's blood pressure was so low it took over one hour and 10 minutes for diana to reach the hospital a distance of three miles the inquiry never raised the disturbing question did this delay almost guarantee diana would die in an accident so soon after the paparazzi were arrested they became the first guilty party [Music] with the snappers behind bars the police took no notice of what patel was saying he had seen no paparazzi around him or around the mercedes but he was surprised to find himself bundled into a van in handcuffs and taken to paris police headquarters [Music] the information provided by patel leads us to believe the official was chief of police masoni we put this to mr masoni but he has never responded is my that night the police briefed the press that patel was lying parry match's chief reporter had the story from patel's lawyer three days later by suppressing patel's evidence the french could blame the photographers from early september patel's lawyer asked the inquiry to hear his client they only agreed to do so seven months later then the inquiry asked the police to explain why patel's original statement had been lost foreign [Music] the police first claimed patel was a liar and second that he didn't speak clearly enough yes there had been a call to the emergency services as patel claimed but the caller said he was speaking from amal marso not alma marso no such place as almond marso exists [Music] harrods head of security had worked at scotland yard for 26 years my first concern was i'd learned that the bodyguards had decided not to deploy a backup vehicle protection vehicle which was contrary to all of our own rules that surprised me greatly i was also very surprised when i learned particularly from television footage that the french police had not isolated the tunnel to preserve it for evidence whether this was something other than a traffic accident or not something of this magnitude involving diana princess of wales the scene should have been preserved these extraordinary images are from that night shortly before dawn the property de paris the green vehicles which sweep the streets sprayed detergent in the tunnel not the best way of preserving forensic evidence was it a cleanup or a cover-up the whole diana factor does alarm the establishment she has this volcanic capacity to um cause um great grief dismay lack of logic um distract from the from the main purpose of the royal family and certainly an inquest could throw up some uncomfortable questions [Music] the most famous woman in the world had died [Music] as diana's body was brought back to britain everyone here expected a thorough investigation like an inquest but france does not have public inquests the government appointed a middle-ranking judge irve stefan to carry out an inquiry into what caused the deaths he worked to rules that haven't changed much since napoleon first of all you have something which is called the secrecy of the investigation in france that means that apart from the investigating judge and the parties the parties being really really limited to the lawyers and the prosecutor no one has access to the prosecution no one has access to the file no one has access to the evidence so the media don't know anything the public does not know anything and nobody can verify what's in the file over there they have the inquisitorial system where an officer of the state conducts the inquiry with the assistance of the police and of course all officers of the state are paid by the state and beholden to the state and one is shall we say in no circumstances skeptical as to whether or not there can be interference from above [Music] the standard accident investigation carried out by french traffic police has never been made public and does not form part of the official report but patrick chauvel a well-known french photographer did speak at some length to traffic police who carried out the original investigation they made their own investigation of course but then they had pressure from the elysee who told them to keep it low you know and they were not very happy about that because they made their own inquiry and that's their job so they don't like to be pushed you know when they're doing their job honestly 36 hours after the crash the french authorities changed their view it was no longer the fault of the paparazzi but a drink-driving accident an explanation they still insist to be true good evening the paris prosecutor's office disclosed today that the driver of the car in which princess diana was fatally injured had an illegal blood alcohol level he said to been more than three times over the french limit and twice the british one there was also more evidence today about the speed at which the car was travelling when it crashed a police saw said the speedometer was found frozen at more than 120 miles an hour within just over 24 hours of this crash when it was put out that this was caused by a drunk driver a person drunk as a pig driving at 192 kilometers they were false statements they were certainly false statements then and we know their false statements now and one of the reasons we know that is that the statement as to the drink drive was put out before henri paul's body samples had even been fully analyzed so they didn't have an analysis report of this and yet it was put out that he was drunk severely drunk they also said that the speedometer of the car was stuck at 192 kilometers per hour that was refuted immediately by mercedes themselves who said on impact the speedometer of the car reverts to zero now that's something they had to concede right away the files showed the inquiry tried to work out the speed of the car mercedes were paid to carry out crash tests although their experts were never allowed to inspect the vehicle but what is not in the files is another picture which could have given a quick and clear answer to the speed as chevelle heard from the traffic police well this guidewellman was pissed of the pressure and he said i'm going to show you something and if ever this goes bad maybe i'll forget the photo on my office and you can sort of take it and it was a photo taken by the flash of there's a flash there's a camera there it was it's gone now at the entrance of that tunnel and you know those flash pictures when you go over 60 kilometers an hour which is the speed limit so the flash is a frontal flash so you can see the people in the car you can recognize them and on that picture you can recognize absolutely everybody in the car and it says the speed and the date and what were the people in the car like well the driver was normal if i can say so i mean i i didn't know his face before he looks pretty the guy on the right side looks tense he seems a little bit afraid maybe the car's going too fast and the people in the back are just laughing their heads off having fun we ask chevelle why that photo had never been released when they made their first comment to the press the official comment was that the flash didn't work at that time but then somebody found out that the guy who was driving like five minutes before 10 minutes before in his normal car got 15 days later his ticket the files show the final estimate was that the car crashed at around 65 miles an hour but that was never published two days after the crash french police stressed the car's speed and how drunk the driver was but the evidence for that is poor these enhanced images are from the ritzy's own video they show that 30 minutes before the crash ori paul squats and ties his shoelaces he transfers his weight gracefully from left to right and gets up again without a hitch or stumble [Music] paul spent two hours before setting up from the ritz in the company of trevor reese jones did trevor reese jones have any feeling that harry potter was drunk no none whatsoever he would in fact not permitted in any shape or form about anybody he had suspicion of having drunk to drive the car that was that was an essential part of his job to ensure the couple's security the autopsy on honorary paul was carried out by professor dominique lucont and dr gilbert pepe they concluded that ori paul's blood had 1.74 grams of alcohol twice the legal limit in britain he also had legal medication and an average of 20.7 percent of carbon monoxide the carbon monoxide reading is bizarre because such a high level leads to erratic behavior the first thing we wanted was an independent post-mortem and that was denied denied without reason they wouldn't give a reason why we couldn't have one we then asked for an independent analysis of these body samples and that was denied we then asked whether we could be present at any subsequent examination of only paul's body and that was denied all of these things without reason the police got a search warrant for ori paul's flat his friend garrick had the keys and watched [Music] [Music] the the paul family were denied access to the material in these bottles their sons blood and urine samples backed by al fired they got four of europe's top pathologists to examine the post-mortem report they dissected the autopsy and listed 28 critical errors that made the procedure unreliable these included that the autopsy was not timed no proper description was given of how his body was identified no explanation was given for the 20.7 percent of carbon monoxide the final conclusions of the four pathologists were damning the results on carbon monoxide in the blood are inexplicable as inexplicable as the attitude of dr piper and professor lucont who continue to present arguments which have no rigor and no scientific value to justify their results the hypothesis that there was a mix-up in the samples needs to be seriously considered 22 other corpses were in the morgue that night the paul family backed by al-fayed sued the state to obtain their son's samples so they could do a dna test to check it was really his blood the french attorney general took over the case but so far the family has not succeeded the judge said privately that the blood was the great mystery of the affair but he did not probe further his similar failure to probe ori paul's security connections surprised richard tomlinson i do find it really strange that judge stefan didn't really i mean i was expecting him to go through in great detail all the details of the file and i mean you know i i could have given him enough information uh to have for him to have you know identified which file it was and he could have i mean it takes a brave magistrate to do it but he could have you know asked for a subpoena of the fire through the british government and asked for the file and those mechanisms to do that you could do that oh really oh yeah yeah yeah you can whether mi6 would agree to it i don't know but if there was sufficient pressure then they would have to yeah this was only one of a number of lines of inquiry the french refused to pursue for muhammad al fayed it was a personal tragedy but it could also have become a business problem traverse jones's lawyers wanted the inquiry to consider whether the ritz and the firm that owned the mercedes etual limousine might have been negligent the mercedes diana used had been stolen three months earlier and its electronics ripped out had the repairs been properly carried out we tried to reorientate the investigation on another way especially towards the twilight museum and the ritz that by that time uh the investigating magistrate and the prosecution wanted to come to an end because there was too much pressure because no one would know the real truth anyway so it had to be stopped so it was stopped and of course not everything has been acquired on 27 volumes of facts speculation and evidence reveal another enigma dodie had his mobile phone that night and yet astonishingly when the police logged all the possessions of the victims they found he had no papers no lighter no cigarettes and certainly no mobile phone all that was on his body was one thousand francs did you get the impression that stuff had been found in the car which we were not told about yes they found stuff in the car which was not especially unusual in lots of car accidents you have dope but it's the dope was not in the driver's hand it was in the passenger so so what but what they didn't like is the pressure suddenly the eliza told them to keep it low a high-ranking police source confirmed to us patrick chauvel's claims that illegal drugs were found in the car and the existence of the speed camera photo which has never been produced some evidence seems to have gone missing some evidence doesn't seem to have been followed up in the files we also found this photograph taken between 20 and 22 minutes past midnight there is one picture or two which is obviously taken from before the car somebody has to be uh has to drive before the car to take that picture especially since you see traverse jones looking into the mirror but i can't say exactly where that picture was taken it was obviously taken somewhere in the tunnel but i can't say if it's in the beginning of the torah in the middle or after some sort of accident or whatever but it's taken in the armatum yes so who took this photo we may never know 17 days after the crash the paparazzi were no longer under arrest for manslaughter but was still charged with failure to help the victims the inquiry had leaked ori paul was drunk then another new development which appeared to explain how the accident happened the police said they'd found debris from a white fiat uno in the tunnel it was suggested the fiat was in front of the mercedes the mercedes wing mirror was found at this point with traces of another car's paintwork and shards of a fiat tail light the mercedes was thrown into the right-hand wall then hurled across into the 13th pillar in the middle of the tunnel the police started a massive search operation but only questioned owners of white fietunos in the paris area they drew a blank but al fayad's detectives did better and tracked down this fiatuno its rear tail light had been fixed and it belonged to a paparazzi his name was james anderson his past was even more mysterious than ori paul's james arnold saw made no secret of the fact he had a white fiatuno when french television profiled him three years ago photos during the summer diana had been photographed by james anderson he was a paparazzi with political connections at the highest level he was the official photographer to one french prime minister and friendly enough with another to share a motorbike with him yet french special branch was so worried by his history they'd started to investigate him as one of their senior officers revealed to us richard tomlinson recalls a figure like adam saw in mi6 the mi6 have a carder of people who have their own profession their own life they do their own job so it can be barristers they can be all sorts of things who just happen to have a skill which is occasionally useful to mi6 and they kind of work on a short-term contractual basis for mi6 they had one guy who was a photographer and his normal job was as a paparazzi photographer but occasionally he would do work for mi6 french security services had evidence arson was in the alma tunnel [Music] the widow of one of odorson's friends confirmed he had boasted to them he was at the scene [Music] french special branch became interested in onol saw when they noticed he'd been the last person to photograph and one of the last to talk with pierre bergevoir [Music] uh [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] apparently committed suicide by setting fire to himself in his car on this piece of army land he left no suicide note his body was found by french commandos both friends and even the funeral director are very skeptical that allah saw really killed himself none of this was ever mentioned by the french inquiry under british law there has to be an inquest into the death of any british subject who dies abroad in mysterious or unexplained circumstances now that was obviously the case with princess diana and dodie all fired but though they died in 1997 no inquest was opened until 2004. the royal coroner then did two things first he formally opened the inquest and second he asked the ex-commissioner of the metropolitan police britain's top cop if you like lord stevens to investigate how the french had investigated the crash lord stephens took a team to paris he got access to all kinds of documents which investigators and journalists obviously found it hard to get to and he said rather cryptically that there really was something wrong with the way the french had gone about the investigation we've got new witnesses and new forensic evidence but then we had another shock in june 2006 by then everybody thought lord stevens would soon issue his report and everybody thought the coroner would finally open the inquest properly but suddenly the coroner then announced that the inquests into princess diana and dodie alfred were simply too time consuming and he had to resign so we now find ourselves in the very strange position that there has to be an inquest the inquest has been opened but there is nobody to run the inquest james adolfson was only one reason why there was pressure not to explore certain irregularities about the accident investigation the first witness on the scene was ignored and deliberately discredited a proper traffic accident investigation was apparently suppressed and the victim's possessions had apparently vanished the dead driver's autopsy was clearly flawed yet formed the basis for the main conclusion that drunk driving was to blame [Music] the driver and another key witness had strong secret service connections but these were never explored to blame the driver ori paul as the french authorities have done may be convenient even politic but the true causes of the crash are complex and murky the revelation that diana predicted she would be the victim of a so-called accident has sparked even more calls for an inquest [Music] it's third class treatment for a first-class tragedy it's very difficult to get to the root of why they have delayed there are rather feeble excuses like we're waiting for the french inquiry well the french inquiry is over there are feeble excuses like we want to make sure we can get all the witnesses well the same witnesses are there as as i ever have been there we certainly won't see any quest open in 2006 we probably won't see an inquest open in 2007 and the best guess is that maybe it will open in 2008 11 years after the crash in the alma tunnel

Channel: Real History

Views: 161,193

Keywords: Autopsy Report Analysis, Conspiracies Uncovered, Conspiracy Theories, Controversy, Dark Secrets Exposed, Death Investigation, Forensic Evidence Examined, Hidden Truths Revealed, High Profile Case, Historical Events, History Channel Special, Investigation Details, Media Coverage, Real History, Scandal Unveiled, Space Race, Timeline Analysis, Truth Behind the Headlines, Truth Revealed, UK History, Witness Testimony

Id: x5zmi0kKmsw

Length: 48min 55sec (2935 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 31 2022