POLICE QUIZZED CHARLES OVER DIANA MURDER CONSPIRACY
EXCLUSIVE: Mail investigation reveals full details of Yard chief’s interview with prince over wild crash claims
A POLICE chief today reveals why he was forced to quiz Prince Charles on allegations he plotted to kill Princess Diana.
Lord Stevens, a former head of Scotland Yard, says he had to ‘follow the evidence’ and question the prince over a note his exwife wrote claiming he was planning an accident in her car.
The unprecedented interview was conducted amid enormous secrecy at St James’s Palace during a three-year investigation into Diana’s death in a Paris car crash in 1997.
A crucial part of the probe was the note the princess had written predicting she would die through ‘brake failure and serious head injury’ so Charles could marry his sons’ former nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. In the note Diana added: ‘Camilla is nothing but a decoy so we are being used by the man in every sense of the word.’
Lord Stevens today confirms he read out her incendiary words, which would later fuel conspiracy theories about her death, at his meeting with
Charles on December 6, 2005. At the time, he says, he and his team of detectives had no idea what had made Diana so concerned about her safety.
Charles, who was interviewed by Lord Stevens as a witness and not a suspect, could not explain why his ex-wife had penned the note in October 1995 and left it in the pantry of Kensington Palace for her butler Paul Burrell.
Nearly two years after it was written 36year-old Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed and their chauffeur Henri Paul were all killed when their Mercedes crashed in a tunnel in Paris.
Today Lord Stevens suggests that rogue ex-BBC journalist Martin Bashir, who allegedly used bogus papers to con the princess into granting him a scoop BBC Panorama interview in November 1995, may have exploited her vulnerability and made her paranoid about her security around the time she wrote the note.
In a joint interview with the Daily Mail and a seven part Mail+ podcast series on Diana’s death, the former police chief expresses his regret that he and his officers did not interview Mr Bashir during his investigation, Operation Paget.
He says: ‘If there’d been an allegation then that Bashir had produced allegedly
‘We could not get her heart beating again’
fake documents to Princess Diana, which is a criminal offence, we’d have investigated it. My goodness me, we would have done. But this has only come out recently, which is unfortunate.
‘If we’d known at the time of Paget we would certainly, certainly have gone and seen him and interviewed him. And it would have been part and parcel of the inquiry to get to the bottom of it.
‘We don’t know what Bashir was saying to Diana. But if he had put the fears in her mind which had caused her to write that note then that is what caused us to interview Charles. When we watched the Panorama interview at the start of the inquiry it didn’t cross our mind that Bashir could have done anything fraudulent.
‘After all, this was the BBC, this was their flagship programme and it was being broadcast to the world. There was nothing said in the interview we didn’t know about by then. What we didn’t know of course was how Bashir had managed to get it.’
Lord Stevens, who continued leading the Diana inquiry after he retired from the police in 2005, also tells the landmark Daily Mail series investigating her death:
■ Prince Charles initialled what was effectively a ‘statement of truth’ following his police interrogation in 2005;
■ The highly sensitive document has been filed at the National Archives in Kew and will not be made public until 2038;
■ The Duke of Edinburgh declined to be questioned over false claims made by Dodi’s father Mohamed Al Fayed that he was a driving force in a murder conspiracy;
■ Witnesses told detectives that the princess was prone to ‘wild thoughts’;
■ A handwriting expert confirmed to Paget officers that Diana had definitely written the note she handed to Burrell, predicting her death;
■ Mr Al Fayed offered Lord Stevens extraordinary gifts during Operation Paget, including a pair of fresh stag’s testicles culled from deer on one of his country estates and also Viagra, which the ex-Scotland Yard chief declined to accept.
In addition to Lord Stevens’ explosive interview, the Mail today publishes the first British media interview with a French surgeon who was part of the hospital medical team that tried desperately to keep Diana alive. Monsef Dahman performed surgery while she was still lying on her stretcher in the emergency room at the Paris hospital but her condition deteriorated and she was moved to an operating theatre. ‘We tried electric shocks, several times,’ says Dr Dahman. ‘But we could not get her heart beating again.’ He also reveals that he witnessed some members of the media trying to infiltrate the wards and corridors to get close to those who had been treating Diana.
The exclusive interviews with Lord Stevens and Dr Dahman are the first part of the Mail’s groundbreaking new series on Diana’s death, which will run into next week. Our five-month investigation has taken us around the world and will feature dramatic new testimony from key figures including other police officers, medical staff, Diana’s friends and ex staff.
This newspaper has had access to high level sources who have never spoken before and for the first time we will provide the inside story on Operation Paget, which saw Lord Stevens liaise with the British and American intelligence agencies as he sought the truth over the princess’s death.
Secrecy surrounding Lord Stevens’ interview with Charles was a matter of great frustration to former Harrods owner Mr Al Fayed, who in 2007 made a vain attempt to obtain transcripts.
In April 2008 an inquest returned a narrative verdict of ‘unlawful killing [due to the] grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes’.
The inquest jury also specified Paul’s drink driving and the lack of wearing of seatbelts.
‘Dramatic new testimony from key figures’