Diana’s Merc ‘death on wheels’

TV documentary claims that car was written off by insurance firms

Paris: A new TV documentary and accompanying book that have just been released claimed that Mercedes in which Princess Diana died in a horrific accident in 1997 was a death trap.

According to new reports and The Telegraph, the Merc had been written off, but was later rebuilt and put back on the road.

The 36-year-old princess was being driven at high speed in a Mercedes S-280 after she lift the Ritz Hotel when the vehicle crashed into a pillar in a tunnel under the Alma bridge.

Diana, her then boyfriend Dodi Fayed and driver Henri Paul all died in the crash.

Her bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones survived the incident.

The documentary claims that the pool vehicle was used to drive celebrities around Paris and according to its previous owner had been written off by insurance firms after an earlier accident.

The previous accident allegedly occurred two years before the death of Diana when a prisoner out on remand stole the vehicle and took it on a joyride in the countryside near Paris.

The Mercedes rolled over several times during that crash, the TV programme aired on Tuesday said.

Investigations carried out by both French and British authorities concluded that the driver of Diana’s car, Henri Paul, was responsible for the crash that killed the mother of Princes William and Harry.

He was drunk and on anti-depressants when he lost control of the Mercedes as it sped through the tunnel that lies next to the River Seine trying to shake off paparazzi photographers.

Mr Paul and Mr Fayed died on the spot, while the princess died from her injuries in a nearby hospital a few hours later.

The new documentary had a crash test carried out on the same model of Mercedes and a technical expert told the programme that it should not have gone back on the road despite being rebuilt.

Pascal Rostain, a wellknown paparazzi photographer at the centre of many of the new details on the affair, said, “This car from the Ritz was a wreck, it should never have been put back on the road.” “It was in a previous accident, had rolled over several times, and was then sent to be scrapped, but got authorisation to be restructured,” he said.

Mr Rostain is the coauthor of a book called Who Killed Lady Di?, published on Wednesday, on which the TV documentary is based.