Bashir ‘told Diana security services were planning to wipe her out’
Shock new claim over interview
MARTIN Bashir told Princess Diana the security forces were planning to kill her, according to a new documentary.
Royal biographer Andrew Morton says Bashir warned her: ‘They’re going to wipe you.’
Mr Morton suggests the BBC reporter had shown Diana a document – supposedly a bank statement linked to the security forces – when he made the reference to an apparent threat to her life as part of his attempts to secure his infamous interview with the princess.
The claims will be broadcast in a documentary on Channel 4 on Monday night. Mr Morton says Diana was left ‘ terrified’ after being ‘fed stories’ by Bashir.
The fresh allegations come as the BBC launches an independent inquiry into the 1995 Panorama interview. Bashir, now the BBC’s religion editor, has already been accused of spreading lies about Diana’s friends and staff to win her trust, in addition to showing her faked bank statements.
The new documentary includes footage of BBC bosses celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Diana interview. Among them was former director-general Tony Hall, the corporation’s head of news in 1995, who hails the interview as ‘the scoop of the century’. Lord Hall specifically praises Bashir, saying the reporter ‘works very hard at getting into your confidence’.
BBC documents show it was Lord Hall who effectively exonerated Bashir when evidence of the faked bank statements initially came to light.
The internal inquiry did, however, see BBC bosses decree that the graphic artist commissioned by Bashir to create the fake documents must never work for the corporation again.
Mr Morton, whose biography of Diana shocked the world upon its release in 1992, told the team behind the new documentary that
Bashir played on the princess’s fears that her private secretary Patrick Jephson was in cahoots with his counterpart in Prince Charles’s team, Commander Richard Aylard. ‘They were implicated in this kind of dark conspiracy, to the point where Diana thought that her head was on the chopping block,’ Mr Morton says.
‘[Bashir] was feeding her stories which left her, and I am quoting from one of Diana’s confidantes here, “terrified, horrified”. On one occasion, he showed her some bank statements allegedly about the security forces and said dramatically, “they’re going to wipe you”.’
The Diana Interview: The Truth Behind the Scandal also features Mr Jephson revealing the personal impact of the Panorama affair. ‘It upsets me more than I can say that, quite possibly, the princess died thinking that I had betrayed her,’ he says. Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris less than two years after the interview.
A BBC spokesman said the corporation was ‘determined to get to the truth of what happened’.
‘That’s why we have appointed [former Master of the Rolls] Lord Dyson to lead a fully independent investigation,’ they said. ‘It is vital that everyone with information shares that with Lord Dyson, so that he can investigate thoroughly and draw his conclusions having heard all the evidence.’
‘She was horrified’