The final, haunting photo of Princess Diana, taken on the night she died, shows her sitting with her boyfriend Dodi Fayed in the back of a Mercedes car as it roars away from the rear entrance of the Paris Ritz Hotel, heading for the couple’s secret love-nest near the Champs-Elysees.
Diana is twisting her head to peer out of the Mercedes’ rear window, anxiously looking to see if her car is being chased by the paparazzi who had besieged her and Dodi since their arrival in the French capital from a Mediterranean holiday eight hours earlier.
At the wheel is chauffeur Henri Paul. Dodi’s bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones is in the front passenger seat.
The haunting last picture taken of Diana shows her peering out the rear window to look for paparazzi. Trevor Ress and chauffeur Henri Paul are also pictured
What happened over the next two minutes is central to a new probe by Scotland Yard into an astonishing claim from an SAS sniper, known as Soldier N, that members of his elite regiment assassinated Diana seconds after the Mercedes sped at 63mph into the notoriously dangerous Pont d’Alma road tunnel.
Many will dismiss Soldier N’s claims as yet another conspiracy theory. After all, millions of words have been written about Diana’s death at 12.20am on Sunday, August 31, 1997.
Two inquiries, by Scotland Yard and the French police, have found the deaths were a tragic accident.
An official inquest, which ended five years ago, came to the same conclusion.
The world was led to believe the blame lay with the grossly negligent driving of an intoxicated Mr Paul and the pursuing paparazzi.
But — however unlikely they may seem at first glance — I am convinced there is something in Soldier N’s claims.
Ever since Diana’s death at the age of 36, I have investigated forensically the events that led up to the crash and what happened afterwards.
I have spoken to eye-witnesses, French and British intelligence officers, SAS soldiers and to friends of Diana and Dodi. And I have interviewed the Brittany-based parents of the 41-year-old chauffeur Henri Paul. They told me, with tears in their eyes, that their son was not a heavy drinker: his chosen potion was a bottle of beer or the occasional Ricard, a liquorice-flavoured aperitif.
The fact is that too many of these accounts suggest that Diana’s death was no accident.
Diana in a hotel lift with Dodi Fayed. Sue Reid believes there may be some truth in he Soldier N’s claims
Crucially, my investigations show that the paparazzi who supposedly hounded Diana to her death were not even in the Pont d’Alma tunnel at the time of the car crash.
They also reveal how a high-powered black motorbike — which did not belong to any of the paparazzi — shot past Diana’s Mercedes in the tunnel.
Eyewitnesses say its rider and pillion passenger deliberately caused the car to crash.
In addition, my inquiries unearthed the existence of a shadowy SAS unit that answers to MI6, as well as the names of two MI6 officers who were linked by a number of sources to Diana’s death.
Could the Establishment really have turned Henri Paul and the paparazzi into scapegoats? Could there have been a skilful cover-up by people in powerful places to hide exactly what did happen?
There is little doubt that Diana, recently divorced from Prince Charles, was a thorn in the side of the Royal Family. Her romance with Dodi, though only six weeks old, was serious.
The Princess had given her lover her ‘most precious possession’ — a pair of her deceased father’s cufflinks — and phoned friends, saying she had a ‘big surprise’ for them when she returned from Paris.
Dodi had slipped out of the Ritz Hotel, as Diana was having her hair done, to collect a jewel-encrusted ring adorned with the words ‘Tell Me Yes’ from a swanky Paris jeweller. It came from a collection of engagement rings.
Rumours were circulating, too, that the Princess was pregnant. Photographs of her in a leopard-print swimsuit, on holiday in the South of France 14 days earlier, show an unmistakable bump around her waistline.
And, as the Mail revealed after Diana’s death, she had visited — in the strictest secrecy — a leading London hospital for a pregnancy scan just before that photo was snapped.
To add to the disquiet, the mother of a future King of England and head of the Church of England was threatening to move abroad with her Muslim boyfriend and take the royal Princes, William and Harry, with her.
Dodi had bought an estate, once owned by film star Julie Andrews, by the beach in Malibu, California, and shown Diana a video of it. He told her the sumptuous house was where they would spend their married life.
Ostracised by the Royal Family and stripped of her HRH title, Diana was said to be excited by the prospect.
Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, the multi-millionaire former owner of Harrods, insists Diana was pregnant by his son and preparing to tell the young Princes about her forthcoming marriage when she returned to Britain on September 1 — the day after the crash — before they went back to boarding school.
However far-fetched it sounds, all the Establishment concerns about Diana were genuine. But could this really have led to her assassination? And if so, how could it have been carried out?
These questions are partially answered by the compelling testimony of 14 independent eyewitnesses near the crash scene that night. They say Diana’s car was surrounded at the entrance to the Alma tunnel by a phalanx of cars and motorcycles, which sped after the Mercedes.
Conspiracy theories have long surrounded Diana’s death in Paris in 1997 despite the official finding that it was an accident caused by paparazzi photographers
The assumption has always been that the cars and bikes were carrying the paparazzi. By the Monday morning after the crash, outside the Alma tunnel, a huge message had appeared. ‘Killer paparazzi’ had been sprayed in gold paint on the walls.
No one, to this day, knows who put it there — or why they were not stopped by the French authorities from doing so.
Yet the paparazzi following Diana did not reach the Pont d’Alma tunnel until at least one minute after the crash, so they cannot be to blame.
Indeed, two years later they were cleared of manslaughter charges after the French state prosecutor said there was ‘insufficient evidence’ of their involvement in Diana’s death.
What happened is that the paparazzi had been deceived. In a clever ploy devised by Henri Paul, the Ritz had placed a decoy Mercedes at the front of the hotel to confuse the photographers, which allowed the lovers to slip out of the back door into a similar car.
