Feuding Fayeds in ‘violent’ clash at father’s home
HIS life has already been disfigured by tragedy. But the fates appear to have stored up one final horror for billionaire former Harrods owner Mohamed Fayed.
Twenty-three years after his eldest son, Dodi, died alongside Princess Diana in Paris, two of Fayed’s younger children, Omar and Camilla, are at war in the High Court, I can disclose.
In an incendiary document, Omar, 32, focuses on the afternoon of May 18 when his driver left him at his father’s Surrey estate, Barrow Green Court, so he could have a ‘socially distanced’ meeting with Fayed — his first since lockdown — and use his parents’ gym.
After meeting his father, 91, Omar had ‘a verbal disagreement with his mother’, Fayed’s Finnish second wife, Heini. Things turned far uglier, alleges Omar, when he went to the gym.
While there, he claims, Camilla, 35, and her husband Mohamed Esreb, 40, arrived — allegedly accompanied by Camilla’s bodyguard and their mother’s. It was a disquieting moment for Omar, who, the High Court document explains, has been ‘in dispute’ with Camilla and Esreb — as well as with his mother Heini — for ‘the last few years’. His fears were, allegedly, not misplaced. In the gym, Esreb, Omar alleges, ‘pushed/ grabbed at him’. Fearing that he was going to be ‘violently attacked’, Omar left the gym and telephoned his driver, telling him to return immediately.
As he did so, alleges Omar, Esreb attacked him, ‘punching him in the face’. Returning to the gym to retrieve his belongings, he was allegedly ‘pushed and punched from behind’ by Esreb and the two bodyguards, who tried to grab his phone, which ‘contained a very substantial amount of private, confidential and privileged material’.
During this ‘further violent assault’, he was allegedly ‘struck on the back of his head, grabbed round his neck and brought to his knees’, before being ‘struck on his head again and thrown backwards to the floor where he collided violently with a rowing machine’.
It was then, alleges Omar, that Camilla twice called out: ‘Get the phone!’ and ‘it was taken by one of his assailants’. When his driver returned, Omar fled the estate, photographed his injuries, made a complaint to the police and went to hospital.
Camilla and Esreb — whom Omar is suing for £100,000 damages — decline to comment. But a family friend describes it as ‘a terribly sad case’. The pal tells me: ‘It is a desperate cry for help from a troubled and vulnerable young man.
‘The family have done all they possibly can to reach an amicable and peaceful solution, but all their efforts have fallen on deaf ears.’
Omar evidently disagrees. Groomed to succeed his father at Harrods, he renounced the role, explaining ‘consumerist culture wasn’t doing anything positive for the future of humanity’.