"The official thesis, rubber-stamped by French and Scotland Yard investigations and later at a public British inquest, is that the crash was the result of 'gross negligence' by the Ritz's intoxicated chauffeur, Henri Paul, who was speeding to escape moped-riding paparazzi tailgating the Mercedes, trying to photograph the Princess and her Egyptian lover."
"Tellingly, the ex-bodyguard outlined his own suspicions that something strange happened in the tunnel. He said: 'A witness driving a car that was travelling in front of the Mercedes in Paris told Diana's inquest he saw a high-powered motorbike overtake the car just seconds before the crash.
'Another witness travelling in the opposite direction saw a second motorbike swerve to avoid smoke and Mercedes wreckage, then carry on out of the tunnel without stopping. The bikes' riders were never found, and that is no coincidence.'
Since Diana's death, I have investigated the crash and its aftermath in forensic detail. I have spoken to French and British intelligence officers, members of the SAS and friends of both the late Princess and Dodi Fayed.
One of my most haunting experiences was interviewing the parents of Henri Paul, the Ritz's 41-year-old chauffeur, who was, within hours of Diana's death, being described in French security-service briefings to Paris newspapers as having been 'drunk as a pig' that night.
The couple, who live in Brittany, told me, with tears in their eyes, that their son was not a heavy drinker: they said he enjoyed only an occasional bottle of beer or a Ricard, a liquorice-flavoured aperitif.
They added that, during a meeting at the British Embassy in Paris with Scotland Yard in 2006, they were assured their son was not drunk.
Forensic reports presented to the inquest later showed that Henri Paul had three times the French limit of alcohol in his blood samples. But, curiously, the same samples also showed a high level of carbon monoxide, the deadly gas found in car exhaust fumes.
Could the samples, as some conspiracy theorists suggest, have been swapped with those of a suicide victim? The judge at the inquest said this anomaly was impossible to unravel.
Professor Atholl Johnston, a British clinical pharmacologist, said at the inquest in open hearings that no explanation for the carbon monoxide concentrations had been found. 'It was not a 'measuring glitch',' said Johnston. 'The most likely possibility is that it isn't Henri Paul's blood.'"
"Like Diana's former bodyguard Lee Sansum, I have also discovered that powerful black motorbikes which did not belong to any photographers were close to Diana's car when it crumpled against the 13th pillar of the tunnel.
Compelling testimony, seen by the Mail, can be found in background interviews prepared for the Princess's inquest.
Some of this evidence was revealed at the inquest, some of it was never produced.
But the hundreds of pages show that 14 independent witnesses near the scene remember the doomed Mercedes suddenly being surrounded at the tunnel's entrance by the black motorbikes as well as two cars: a dark saloon and a white turbo Fiat Uno. These all sped on into the darkness of the tunnel after the Mercedes. According to one witness who produced evidence for the inquest, these mysterious vehicles had travelled to the entrance of the tunnel via a nearby slip road and had been nowhere near the Ritz that night.
Piecing together all this information, I found that the saloon had tailgated the Mercedes. Could this have made the chauffeur, perhaps wrongly thinking a paparazzo had caught up with him, drive even faster into the tunnel?
Meanwhile, the Fiat Uno accelerated towards Diana's vehicle, clipping the metalwork and pushing it to one side.
The manoeuvre allegedly allowed one of the black motorbikes, with two riders on board wearing helmets that hid their faces, to speed past Diana's car.
Witnesses at the inquest claim that when one 'rogue' bike was about 15 feet in front of the Mercedes, a fierce flash of white light shone from it — straight into the eyes of the Mercedes driver Henri Paul. The suggestion is that this came from a laser beam carried by a pillion passenger and was directed with precision into Diana's car.
The flash would have temporarily blinded any driver. It would have been followed by a loud bang as the limousine swerved violently before slamming into the pillar.
One of the eyewitnesses, a French harbour pilot driving ahead of the Mercedes — which notably had no back-up car, in contrast to every other journey Diana and Dodi had taken that weekend — claimed to have watched the awful scene in his rear-view mirror.
Chillingly, he recalled the black motorbike stopping after the crash and one of the riders jumping off before going to peer in the window of the Mercedes. The rider, who kept his helmet on, then reportedly turned to his companion, giving a gesture (where both arms are crossed over the body and then thrown out straight to each side) that is used informally in the military to indicate 'mission accomplished'."
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