AP Was There: Diana’s final hours, on a tragic Paris night

PARIS (AP) — A chic dinner on the Ritz in Paris. A post-midnight drive previous the town’s floodlit treasures. After which, tragedy. The story of Princess Diana’s loss of life at age 36 in that catastrophic crash in a Paris visitors tunnel continues to shock, even after a quarter-century.

Twenty-five years later, The Related Press is making obtainable this account of Diana’s closing hours within the French capital, printed on Sept. 5, 1997, a couple of days after the Aug. 31 crash. (The account, based mostly on reporting, interviews and information experiences obtainable on the time, has been trimmed and edited flippantly.)

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Coming into the Pont de l’Alma visitors tunnel at night time, one of many final belongings you see is the floodlit Eiffel Tower.

Its iron latticework shimmering like lace in opposition to a black sky, it possible was one of many final issues Princess Diana ever noticed.

The tower’s lights go off each night time at 1 a.m. By that point on Sunday, Aug. 31, a dying Diana lay trapped in a crumpled wreck of a Mercedes, with rescuers attempting frantically to deal with her whereas they reduce by means of the metallic roof.

The brief journey to the tunnel from the Ritz Lodge had been a shocking one, with a view of the town’s different floodlit treasures: the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe off to the suitable, the gold-domed Lodge des Invalides throughout the river to the left.

4 individuals had been within the automobile: a driver and a bodyguard in entrance, the princess and her boyfriend in again. Behind them — it isn’t clear how far — had been a number of bikes and maybe two vehicles bearing paparazzi.

Approaching the tunnel alongside the Seine River, the shining tower was simply to the left. Even by means of the tinted home windows of a luxurious automobile, it could’ve been laborious to not look.

Seconds later, there was an enormous crash — witnesses mentioned it was like an explosion. It could quickly reverberate around the globe, however for a couple of minutes within the nonetheless night time, there was solely the insistent blare of a automobile horn set off by the driving force’s slumped physique, after which the click of digicam shutters.

For the princess, after the spectacular metropolis lights, there was solely blackness.

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10 p.m.: The night begins for Diana and Dodi Fayed with dinner within the sitting room of the Imperial Suite on the Ritz. It’s the finest suite within the lodge, and no surprise: The lodge is owned by Fayed’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed.

The meals comes from the lodge’s two-star restaurant, Espadon, which suggests swordfish. It’s identified for its 100,000-bottle wine cellar.

Diana is reported to have ordered an appetizer of mushrooms and asparagus, after which sole; for Dodi, turbot.

Dodi could have carried a shock in his pocket: Information experiences quote a Paris jeweler saying he’d bought him an “extraordinary” diamond solitaire ring for $205,000, and it’s on the Ritz that Dodi could have given it to Diana.

Is it an engagement ring? Nobody will ever know for positive.

However the day has been tense. The couple has been having issues with paparazzi ever since their mid-afternoon arrival in Paris. First, they trailed Diana and Dodi from Le Bourget Airport outdoors Paris, on their strategy to see Villa Windsor — a mansion that after housed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and that Dodi’s father has purchased and renovated. Their driver managed to shake the photographers.

Then, an try to have a 9:30 p.m. dinner on the stylish Paris bistro Chez Benoit failed, when paparazzi once more picked up the path. Giving up, Diana and Dodi determine to dine on the Ritz, the place there may be higher safety.

Lodge video reveals the vehicles arriving again on the Ritz, flashes going off as Diana goes by means of a revolving door, eyes downcast, trying distressed.

They stroll down the Ritz’s blue carpet bordered in gold towards the restaurant. Ten minutes later, they stroll again down the hallway — “due to the eye within the restaurant,” Paul Handley-Greaves, head of Al Fayed’s safety staff, says later in London — and head up a spiral staircase to the Imperial Suite.

Inside, the plush lodge, with rust-colored marble columns and flooring coated with Persian rugs, is calm and peaceable. However outdoors the doorway, on the elegant Place Vendome, paparazzi have once more gathered.

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10:08 p.m.: Henri Paul, the No. 2 safety man on the Ritz, arrives on the lodge after having been summoned on his cellular phone at 10 p.m. He parks his personal automobile outdoors, chats with some individuals and shakes arms with a buddy, the night time obligation supervisor and the concierge. Their accounts, Handley-Greaves says, “are that he was sober, he didn’t scent of alcohol, his gait was regular.”

Paul spends the subsequent two hours within the foyer space. At one level, he goes into the lodge bar and sits with two different safety individuals at a desk on the sting of the bar space. There is no such thing as a safety digicam within the bar, however each Handley-Greaves and Michael Cole, an Al Fayed household spokesman, mentioned interviews with lodge personnel confirmed no proof that Paul was consuming.

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12:07 a.m.: After dinner, as they depart the Imperial Suite, Diana and Fayed cease to debate the paparazzi “and the priority that the princess had that one thing would occur,” Handley-Greaves says. “Earlier on within the day,” he tells a London information convention, “she had expressed concern to bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones on the foolhardiness of the motorbike riders, not for the protection of the car she was touring in. She expressed concern that the erratic method through which they had been driving would possibly lead to certainly one of them falling beneath the wheels both of the lead automobile or the backup.”

Diana and Fayed are headed to an condominium he owns off the Champs-Elysees, simply close to the Arc de Triomphe. Realizing paparazzi are outdoors, they’ve determined to make use of two decoy automobiles — Vary Rover and a Mercedes. They put up the Vary Rover outdoors the Ritz’s important entrance, with Fayed’s common driver on the wheel.

They want a 3rd automobile, so a rented Mercedes is known as into service. The jet-black automobile, rented from the Etoile limousine firm, is understood for its silky-smooth journey, however due to its weight, it isn’t the very best automobile for weaving out and in of visitors. “This isn’t the sort of automobile you do slalom in,” says Jean-Pierre Bretton, a limousine driver who typically picks up well-heeled shoppers on the Ritz.

Diana and Dodi want a driver, too, and that’s why Paul has been known as again in from house. Paul, 41, a local of France’s Brittany area, is reported to have obtained particular coaching in Germany to drive the armored Mercedes. Police say Paul lacked the particular license to drive the automobile; the Al Fayed household denies it.

Paris prosecutors say post-mortem blood exams confirmed Paul was legally drunk, and judicial sources, talking on situation of anonymity, put the blood-alcohol stage at greater than thrice the authorized restrict, not less than.

Regardless of experiences that Paul was a heavy drinker, not less than two bartenders who knew him instructed The Related Press they by no means noticed indicators of that.

Tony Poer, a former bartender at Willi’s wine bar close to the Ritz, says Paul was a daily there, however solely drank beer.

“I by no means noticed him extraordinarily drunk,” says Poer, now supervisor of a San Francisco nightclub. “He even gave me a journey house a couple of occasions. I wasn’t fearful or something.”

And Alain Bousseau, proprietor of the Mazarin bar not removed from the Ritz, says that though Paul was reported to be a daily there, he noticed him solely two or thrice in the previous few years. As soon as, he drank solely a small glass of Cheverny wine; one other time, he had a espresso.

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12:19 a.m: Dodi and Diana stand in an space by the again entrance of the lodge, milling with safety officers making ready their departure. A Ritz Lodge safety digicam video reveals Dodi slipping his arm protectively round Diana’s waist.

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12:20 a.m.: The couple leaves the Ritz from the again entrance, and climbs into the Mercedes. Diana is wearing a black prime, black jacket and belted white trousers. Her hair is fastidiously coiffed and he or she wears pink lipstick.

Dodi appears extra informal in a tan jacket and lengthy grey shirt, open on the neck and hanging loosely over stone-washed denims.

The lodge video reveals no paparazzi outdoors the again entrance, however the decoy ruse clearly hasn’t labored.

With paparazzi in pursuit, the Mercedes travels down the Rue Cambon and turns proper onto the colonnaded, boutique-lined Rue de Rivoli, with the Tuileries Gardens on the left. Arriving on the Place de la Concorde, it takes a left previous the obelisk, permitting a view of the Champs-Elysees and the Arc de Triomphe on the suitable because it makes its strategy to the financial institution of the Seine.

Right here, some photographers say, Paul already is driving dangerously. Jacques Langevin says he was instructed by fellow photographers that on the Place de la Concorde, after they had been stopped at a pink gentle, the Mercedes took off with a roar earlier than the sunshine turned inexperienced.

Already, the photographer instructed the Liberation day by day, “the Mercedes was fishtailing dangerously and the driving force didn’t appear to be in management.”

Neither Diana nor Fayed are sporting seat belts; solely bodyguard Rees-Jones, sitting within the entrance passenger seat, is sporting one.

The Mercedes is heading alongside the river now, down the Cours de la Reine, then the Cours Albert 1st, the place the strategy to the tunnel lies.

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About 12:25 a.m.: The Mercedes enters the 660-foot-long tunnel, in all probability to keep away from visitors on the crowded Place de l’Alma. The tunnel is brightly lit, neon bulbs reflecting on the white-tiled partitions.

The strategy is harmful at excessive pace. The street swerves barely to the suitable, then to the left; then there’s a fast dip.

The pace restrict is 30 mph. A cab driver says he as soon as tried the tunnel at 70 mph and was scared. “That factor is slender and harmful,” mentioned Jacques Gaulthier. “You’d must be loopy to take it quick.”

Simply how briskly does Paul take it?

Police officers, talking on situation of anonymity, say the automobile’s speedometer was discovered frozen at 196 kilometers per hour, or 121 mph. They name it an nearly sure indicator of its pace at affect, however the Al Fayed household disputes that, saying the speedometer was caught as an alternative at zero. A Mercedes knowledgeable says the speedometer strikes robotically to 0 or to prime pace when energy cuts off.

Witnesses even have described the automobile as going nicely over 90 mph, maybe near 120 mph.

Additionally, police say the automobile, outfitted with anti-lock brakes, left 53 ft of skid marks — one other indication of excessive pace.

It isn’t clear what number of paparazzi are tailing the automobile, and at what distance. A lawyer for Al Fayed says a “cortege” of paparazzi had been “swarming” the automobile. However one photographer, Lazlo Veres, says they had been not less than 550 yards behind.

Seconds after the automobile enters the tunnel within the left westbound lane, it goes uncontrolled, putting the thirteenth concrete pillar dividing the tunnel, rolls over and rebounds into the suitable wall. It then spins round. When the automobile stops, it’s going through east — the course it got here from.

The driving force’s physique is slumped over the horn. The affect is so nice that components of the radiator are reportedly discovered embedded in his physique. Fayed, behind him on the left facet of the automobile, is also killed instantly.

Jack and Robin Firestone, vacationers from Lengthy Island in New York, are strolling close to the tunnel after they hear the terrible noise. They run in. In interviews, they, too, describe photographers “swarming” the wreck.

But a health care provider who says he was driving by means of the tunnel within the different course simply after the accident, arriving earlier than rescuers did, says he wasn’t hindered by the photographers.

Dr. Frederic Mailliez says Diana “was unconscious, moaning and gesturing in each course” as she fought for breath.

“There have been 10 or 15 photographers round, they usually had been snapping photographs nonstop, however I can’t say they hindered my work,” he says.

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12:27 a.m.: Firefighters get the primary name for assist.

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About 12:40 a.m.: Police and firefighters arrive. Diana and bodyguard Rees-Jones are nonetheless alive. The automobile is a crumpled mass of metallic and glass.

Police arrest six photographers and one motorcyclist, confiscating their movie and mobile telephones.

Rescuers want to chop by means of the roof of the automobile to get the victims out. They lastly extract Diana by means of the again. In the meantime, emergency medical doctors have been attempting to deal with her on the scene.

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2 a.m.: Diana is bleeding closely from the chest when she arrives at Hospital La Pitié Salpêtrière, together with the bodyguard. She shortly goes into cardiac arrest.

Docs shut a wound to the left pulmonary vein, then attempt to revive her with two hours of chest therapeutic massage — first externally after which on to the center. It fails.

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4 a.m.: Diana is asserted useless.

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6 a.m.: “The loss of life of the Princess of Wales,” says British ambassador Michael Jay, with medical doctors at a hospital information convention, “fills us all with shock and deep grief.”

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