Diana inquest opens 10 years after her death

LONDON—An inquest opened on Tuesday into Princess Diana’s death in a Paris car crash 10 years ago, with her lover’s father convinced the British royal family ordered the killing.
Mohamed al-Fayed, whose son Dodi died in the crash after a brief but high-profile summer romance with Diana, alleges the couple were killed on the orders of Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Diana’s former father-in-law.
Al-Fayed, owner of London’s luxury Harrods store, fought a long legal battle to have the inquest heard by a judge and jury. London’s High Court is expected to spend up to six months deciding if her death was an accident.
“Mohamed al-Fayed has maintained throughout that the crash was not an accident, but murder in furtherance of a conspiracy by the Establishment, in particular his Royal Highness Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who used the security services to carry it out,” said judge Lord Justice Scott Baker, setting out the background to the case. Major investigations by French and British police have concluded the deaths were a tragic accident caused by a speeding chauffeur, who was found to be drunk. Diana, 36, Dodi al-Fayed, 42, and chauffeur Henri Paul were killed when their Mercedes car crashed in a road tunnel as they sped away from the Ritz Hotel in Paris, pursued by paparazzi on motorbikes.
Britain had to wait for the French legal process to end and then for the British police investigation to run its course before the inquests into Diana’s and Fayed’s deaths could begin. The death of the popular Diana, “the people’s princess,” sparked off an unprecedented outpouring of grief from normally buttoned-up Britons. Up to 140 reporters from around the world have been accredited to attend the court and the jury have been promised police protection from the glare of media publicity. Under British law, an inquest is needed to determine the cause of death when someone dies unnaturally. Scott Baker told the jury of six women and five men that their mission was a “search for the truth” about the August 31, 1997 crash. “None of you would for a moment have thought that over 10 years later you might be on a jury investigating the events relating that tragic August night,” Scott Baker said.
He told the jury to ignore the “literally millions” of words written about the crash, much of which had shown a “disregard for the facts.” Scott Baker ran through in detail the couple’s movements on the fateful night and told the jurors that they would be flying to Paris next week to see the scene of the crash. He also touched upon an infamous comment made to reporters by Diana and a picture of her in a leopard skin swimming costume which prompted speculation she was pregnant.—Agencies