‘Prince Philip and Blair ordered murder’

PRINCE Philip and Tony Blair ordered the murder of Princess Diana in the “crime of the century”, Mohamed Al Fayed sensationally claimed yesterday.

Mohamed Al Fayed outside the court yesterday Mohamed Al Fayed outside the court yesterday

Branding the Royals a “Dracula family”, he said the plot was engineered to prevent Diana marrying his Muslim son Dodi and to clear the way for Prince Charles to marry his “crocodile” wife Camilla.

He claimed that senior members of the Royal Family, with Mr Blair’s sanction, ordered MI6 to plan Diana and Dodi’s assassination in a 1997 Paris crash and were helped by a whole string of senior politicians, British and French police officers, judges and others to carry out and then cover up their plot.

He even suggested the Queen had bought the silence of Diana’s butler Paul Burrell by providing evidence that cleared him of theft.

On an extraordinary day at the inquest in London, the Harrods tycoon pointed the finger at a huge cast of characters ranging from Diana’s own sister Sarah to “stooge judges”, newspaper editors, French ambulance drivers and doctors.

In a series of extraordinary outbursts, he branded the Duke of Edinburgh a “Nazi” and “fascist” and said Diana suffered “day and night for 20 years at the hands of this Dracula family”.

Mr Al Fayed also insisted Diana was pregnant with his grandson when she died and anyone who said she was not was “talking baloney”.

He claimed that death crash driver Henri Paul was tricked by MI6 into carrying the couple to their deaths.

And he accused two former heads of the Metropolitan Police Service of acting “unprofessionally” and having “no conscience”.

When one of the inquest barristers accused him of depriving Diana of dignity in death, Mr Al Fayed hit back and demanded to know why he kept “asking silly questions”.

Having waited more than 10 years for his day in court to air all his grievances fully in public, Mr Al Fayed appeared determined to paint a picture of a massive conspiracy involving scores of people. Insisting he would be making “no allegations”, the Harrods boss then began his evidence by reading out a three-page statement – beginning one of the most extraordinary days the Royal Courts of Justice has ever seen.

Mr Al Fayed named two alleged MI6 officers who he said were integral to the plot – diplomats Nicholas Langman and Richard Spearman, who were attached to Britain’s Paris embassy in 1997.

He also accused Diana’s friend Rosa Monckton of spying on the Princess at the behest of her brother, an MI6 officer, and her husband, former newspaper editor Dominic Lawson, who worked for the intelligence service, he claimed.

And on a day of high drama, he appealed directly to the coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker and the jury of six women and five men to give him justice by getting to the bottom of the conspiracy. “I need your help please,” he told the coroner.

His appeal followed heated exchanges with Richard Horwell, QC, for the Metropolitan Police, who accused the Egyptian billionaire of allowing allegations to trip off his tongue without a shred of evidence to support them.

“You don’t care what you say about anyone do you Mr Al Fayed? The rights and interests of others matter not to you, do they?” he asked.

The Egyptian billionaire insisted that Mr Blair as the new Prime Minister in 1997 must have known about the plot along with his “senior henchmen”. They included his chief of staff, the then Home Secretary Jack Straw and possibly Robin Cook, the then Foreign Secretary, he told the court.

Mr Al Fayed, 75, alleged that Diana’s own brother-in-law Lord Fellowes, who was the Queen’s private secretary at the time, coordinated the murder plot in Paris along with British, French and US security and intelligence services.

He accused two consecutive Metropolitan Police commissioners, Lord Condon and Lord Stevens, of helping to cover up the conspiracy as well as Britain’s ambassador in Paris, Sir Michael (now Lord) Jay.

Leading medical experts in both Paris and London, ordinary police officers in both capitals and Paul Burrell were also accused of helping to cover up the murder and lie about it being a tragic accident.

Mr Al Fayed said the Ritz Hotel security manager Mr Paul was duped by his MI6 handlers into driving the couple into an ambush.

He claimed photographer James Andanson, who he alleged worked as a secret agent, caused the crash by driving his white Fiat Uno into the couple’s Mercedes as they entered the Alma Tunnel in Paris in the early hours of August 31, 1997.

He said politicians, reporters, newspaper editors and what he branded “stooge judges” had taken part in a conspiracy to discredit him ever since he had gone public with his allegations.

The exhaustive list of conspirators prompted the coroner – to guffaws from the public gallery – to remark: “There seem to be an awful lot of people involved in this conspiracy.”

Mr Al Fayed claimed the plot to kill the couple swung into action after the Establishment discovered that Diana was pregnant with Dodi’s child and that the couple would be announcing their engagement on September 1, the day after they died.

But in angry exchanges across the courtroom, Mr Horwell said: “You haven’t even permitted this women to have dignity in death, have you Mr Al Fayed?

“We have had to ask witness after witness questions about her methods of contraception and even her menstrual cycle. And the evidence shows that Diana could not have been pregnant.”

 

At times the tycoon’s courtroom clashes with the barristers resembled a vaudeville act, sparking laughter among the large crowd following the hearing on closed-circuit television in the public gallery.

But at other times Mr Al Fayed was highly emotional, at one point wiping away tears with a tissue, betraying how raw his grief at his son’s death still is, a decade on.

One of Mr Al Fayed’s most startling outbursts came when he claimed that the Royal Family really ran Britain, led by Prince Philip, a racist Nazi, and that democracy in Britain was a sham.

It was Philip, he said, who ordered MI6 to murder Diana and Dodi because he could not countenance her marrying a Muslim and having his child. He pointed to Philip’s upbringing and the fact that several of his German relatives married senior Nazis.

“He was brought up by his auntie who married Hitler’s general. This is the guy who is now in charge and manipulating everything and can do anything. They are still living in the 18th and 19th century,” he said.

Producing a photograph of Philip as a teenager, Mr Al Fayed told the hearing: “Here is an article. I would like to show it to you, walking with a Hitler general when he was 15 years old. Here it is.

“You want someone like that, growing up with the Nazis, accept(ing) my son? There is no way. This is the proof again.”

Mr Al Fayed said he believed there were others in the Establishment who could not accept an Egyptian Muslim as a stepfather to the future King of England.

He told the jury: “ I think Prince Philip is the actual head of the Royal Family and he is a racist, as anybody knows, with all his announcements in several meetings and several conferences.”

He told the jury: “It’s time to send him back to Germany or from where he came from.

“You want to know his original name? It ends with Frankenstein. It sounds like Frankenstein,” he told the court to laughter in the public gallery.

The Duke of Edinburgh is a member of the Danish-German aristocratic house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg.

Ian Burnett, QC, for the coroner, commenting on Mr Al Fayed’s remarks, said: “This stems from your belief that Prince Philip is not only a racist but in truth a Nazi as well.” He replied: “Yes.”

When asked by Mr Burnett if he felt that Prince Charles was involved in the plot to murder the couple, Mr Al Fayed said: “He participated. Definitely. And I am sure he knows what is going to happen because he would like to get on and marry his Camilla and this is what happened.

“They cleared the decks. They finished her. They murdered her and now he is happy with his crocodile wife and he’s happy with that. These are the two main people who will not accept first of all.

“It is well known he is racist. He will not accept my son as a person who is different religion, naturally tanned, curly haired. They will not accept that he will have anything to do with the future king.”

Earlier, he had also suggested that the Queen had bought Paul Burrell’s silence by dramatically remembering evidence that cleared the former butler of stealing some of Diana’s possessions.

But asked directly if he thought the Queen was involved in the plot, he said: “I don’t think the Queen is as important as that.” The tycoon told the hearing that Diana was killed just at the moment when she had finally found true love and happiness.

“She suffered for 20 years in this Dracula family. Twenty years, if it is from Prince Charles or Prince Philip, and the minute that she can see happiness and love at the end in a family which she respects, they don’t let her do that and they took my son with her,” he said.

Mr Al Fayed was asked by Lord Justice Scott Baker whether his view of the Royal Family had changed following the crash. The tycoon replied: “Before I have good relations with them. I’m invited, I sit next to the Queen, I’m sponsoring for £20million, for 20 years the Royal Horse Show.

“Prince Philip comes to Harrods shopping. Even all his Nazi German relations came over for dinner. I have no problem.

“So when they step on my feet and murder my son, I’m not accepting that.”

Mr Al Fayed insisted that the plot involved the Royal Family and the Establishment and that it also took in dozens of other people and organisations.

And he claimed the cover-up began as soon as the crash had occurred, with the French police and medical staff.

The tycoon said Diana had told him that she kept a wooden box and that if anything were to happen to her he must make sure the contents of the box were made public.

In the days following Diana’s death, Mr Al Fayed said, the Princess’s sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale admitted she thought the crash was suspicious. But he said that within days she had joined the conspiracy, deciding to hide the truth on the instructions of her powerful brother-in-law, Lord Fellowes, the Queen’s private secretary, who is married to her middle sister Jane.

Mr Al Fayed said: “She told me that she thought the crash was suspicious, that she would find the box and keep its contents safe. She has not done so.” He added: “I am certain, also, that she was part of the cover-up.” Mr Horwell responded to his claim: “This is a particularly vile accusation that you make isn't it? That the sister of Diana is involved in the cover-up of her murder?”

But Mr Al Fayed continued undeterred. He said he had also spoken to Mr Burrell about the box immediately after the crash and was assured by the butler that it would be kept safe.

“I told him if anybody tried to tamper with the contents to tell me,” he said. “He did not keep his promise. The next I heard he had been arrested.”

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was also implicated in the plot. Extracts from a letter Mr Al Fayed wrote in February 2006 to a member of Parliament’s intelligence and security committee were read out.

Mr Burnett said Mr Al Fayed had stated that “such a momentous and horrific action would have been directly sanctioned by the Prime Minister”.

He asked: “The list of conspirators, those who are involved in this, we can add Tony Blair to the this list?” Mr Al Fayed replied: “You can.”

Mr Al Fayed also told the inquest that he believed the murder plot involved photographer James Andanson, who owned a white Fiat Uno, and that Andanson had been paid by MI6 to cause the crash.

He said: “There was one paparazzi member in the pay of the security services. This is likely to have been James Andanson, who exacted the murder in his own Fiat, pushed the car and a strobe light having been used to blind Henri Paul.”

The badly burned body of Andanson was found inside a BMW in a forest in France in May  2000.

Mr Al Fayed claimed that Andanson was killed to prevent the murder plot leaking out. He also insisted that French police, medical staff and legal officials who concluded that he had committed suicide were all part of the cover-up.

Mr Al Fayed claimed that the French ambulance service, infiltrated by MI6 officers or French intelligence officers, deliberately took two hours to get the Princess to the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital.

He even insisted that the sole survivor of the crash, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, who suffered terrible injuries, had been “got at” by MI6 and had pretended to have lost his memory to avoid being killed by the security services.

Lord Jay, the then British Ambassador to France, was also alleged to be part of the conspiracy, the inquest was told, ordering Diana’s body to be embalmed to prevent any evidence of her pregnancy showing.

Mr Al Fayed also told the inquest that Diana herself had told him she was pregnant and that she and Dodi were to announce their engagement in a phone call about an hour before the crash.

He said: “Diana told me on the telephone that she was pregnant. I’m the only person they told.”

And he insisted that anyone who said the Princess was not pregnant when she died was talking “baloney”.

Several of Diana’s close friends have sworn there was no chance that she was pregnant but Mr Al Fayed accused them all of lying as part of the cover-up.

Mr Al Fayed also told the inquest  that Diana had personally told him how she feared for her life. “She told me that she knew Prince Philip and Prince Charles were trying to get rid of her,” he said.

The tycoon drew attention to a note written by Diana’s divorce lawyer Lord Mishcon after an October 1995 meeting, outlining her fears that there was a plot to kill her in a car crash.

In the strictest of confidence Lord Mishcon passed it on to police following a meeting with the then Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Condon after the Princess’s death.

It was only when Mr Burrell produced a note from the Princess making similar allegations in October 2003, while Sir John Stevens was head of the Met, that the police agreed to hand over the note to the coroner in Paris in December 2003.

Reading from a statement, Mr Al Fayed said: “I cannot believe that they sat upon such an important note and did not pass it on. I believe that they acted unprofessionally and they must have no conscience.”

He described the note as “devastating” and said it explained Diana’s fears in “black and white”.

He accused Lord Stevens of continuing the cover-up in the report he published after his three-year £3.6million investigation into the deaths, which concluded the crash had simply been a tragic accident.

He also brushed off Mr Horwell’s suggestion that if Diana was murdered because she was going to marry a Muslim then it could have happened when she was dating heart surgeon Hasnat Khan.

The tycoon insisted her relationship with Khan was not serious, claiming it was impossible that Diana could have lived with someone on a surgeon’s salary.

“He was just a friend, maybe some relations, how can she marry someone like that, that lives in a council flat and has no money?” he said.

At one point Mr Al Fayed broke down in the witness box as he was asked about the moment he was told of his son’s death.

In emotional scenes, he was asked by Mr Burnett who had phoned him with the “dreadful news”.

Mr Al Fayed replied: “It’s difficult. I’d like to know why you are asking me things like that?”

He then took a folded white tissue from his pocket and dabbed his face and had tears in his eyes.

Ritz hotel president Frank Klein has previously told the inquest that he telephoned Mr Al Fayed to break the news as soon as he was informed and recounted how his boss told him: “This is not an accident.”

In another dramatic part of the hearing, gasps rang around the court when Mr Al Fayed branded Dodi’s former girlfriend Kelly Fisher “a hooker”.

The American model has told the inquest that she was engaged to Dodi but that she found out he was cheating on her with Diana when she saw pictures of them together in newspapers.

But Mr Al Fayed claimed she was just one of his son’s many girlfriends.

“Kelly Fisher is just a hooker,” he said.

When asked why he called her that, Mr Al Fayed replied: “Because she was only after money and after catching Dodi.”Mr Horwell told him: “You truly do not care what you say about whom, do you Mr Al Fayed?

“The rights and interests of others matter not to you do they?”

But Mr Al Fayed yesterday vowed he would continue to pursue the truth about how his son died “until I die”. He told the court: “I will continue. I’m not resting until I die. Whatever, if I lose everything to find the truth.”

He added: “I want to expose those gangsters. Not only for me but for the nation and for the ordinary people of this country.” The hearing continues.

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