![]() ![]() Knowing paparazzi are outside, they’ve decided to use two decoy vehicles - Range Rover and a Mercedes. She expressed concern that the erratic manner in which they were driving might result in one of them falling under the wheels either of the lead car or the backup.”ĭiana and Fayed are headed to an apartment he owns off the Champs-Elysees, just near the Arc de Triomphe. “Earlier on in the day,” he tells a London news conference, “she had expressed concern to bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones at the foolhardiness of the motorcycle riders, not for the safety of the vehicle she was traveling in. There is no security camera in the bar, but both Handley-Greaves and Michael Cole, an Al Fayed family spokesman, said interviews with hotel personnel showed no evidence that Paul was drinking.ġ2:07 a.m.: After dinner, as they leave the Imperial Suite, Diana and Fayed stop to discuss the paparazzi “and the concern that the princess had that something would happen,” Handley-Greaves says. At one point, he goes into the hotel bar and sits with two other security people at a table on the edge of the bar area. ![]() Paul spends the next two hours in the lobby area. Their accounts, Handley-Greaves says, “are that he was sober, he didn’t smell of alcohol, his gait was steady.” He parks his own car outside, chats with some people and shakes hands with a friend, the night duty manager and the concierge. 2 security man at the Ritz, arrives at the hotel after having been summoned on his cell phone at 10 p.m. It is the best suite in the hotel, and no wonder: The hotel is owned by Fayed’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed.ġ0:08 p.m.: Henri Paul, the No. It would soon reverberate around the world, but for a few minutes in the still night, there was only the insistent blare of a car horn set off by the driver’s slumped body, and then the clicking of camera shutters.įor the princess, after the spectacular city lights, there was only blackness.ġ0 p.m.: The evening begins for Diana and Dodi Fayed with dinner in the sitting room of the Imperial Suite at the Ritz. Seconds later, there was a huge crash - witnesses said it was like an explosion. Even through the tinted windows of a luxury car, it would’ve been hard not to look. Behind them - it isn’t clear how far - were several motorcycles and perhaps two cars bearing paparazzi.Īpproaching the tunnel along the Seine River, the shining tower was just to the left. Tabloids fume, many in UK shrug over Harry and Meghan seriesįour people were in the car: a driver and a bodyguard in front, the princess and her boyfriend in back. 31, a dying Diana lay trapped in a crumpled wreck of a Mercedes, with rescuers trying frantically to treat her while they cut through the metal roof. The tower’s lights go off every night at 1 a.m. Its iron latticework shimmering like lace against a black sky, it likely was one of the last things Princess Diana ever saw. (The account, based on reporting, interviews and news reports available at the time, has been trimmed and edited lightly.)Įntering the Pont de l’Alma traffic tunnel at night, one of the last things you see is the floodlit Eiffel Tower. Twenty-five years later, The Associated Press is making available this account of Diana’s final hours in the French capital, published on Sept. The story of Princess Diana’s death at age 36 in that catastrophic crash in a Paris traffic tunnel continues to shock, even after a quarter-century. A post-midnight drive past the city’s floodlit treasures. PARIS (AP) - An elegant dinner at the Ritz in Paris. ![]()
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