Around 2 p.m. on Saturday August 30th, 1997, Dodi Al Fayed and Princess Diana flew from Sardinia to Paris.
Henri Paul, the 41 year-old Deputy head of Security at the Paris Ritz, met them and drove the back-up car behind them en route to the Villa Windsor and thence to the Ritz.
Around 11 p.m. Dodi apparently received a "disturbing" call on his mobile phone.
In order to elude the paparazzi Dodi asked Henri Paul to drive Princess Diana and himself to his flat without using the two normal drivers. His idea was for the back-up vehicle to leave first, followed by the decoy car travelling solo on a different route. This plan broke two rules of personal security: travelling in a vehicle without tinted windows and without a back-up.
Around 11.30 p.m. the Ritz asked the car hire company, Étoile Limousine, to provide a Mercedes to act as a decoy car.
Just before midnight Dodi rang his father in Britain.
12.18 the Ritz cameras showed Dodi and Diana inside a small lobby at the back entrance of the Ritz talking to Henri Paul.
At 12.19 the couple left the hotel with Trevor Rees-Jones, the bodyguard, and followed Henri Paul to the car. Of the four, apparently, only Rees-Jones secured his seat belt.
Minutes after the Mercedes drove away, the Ritz cameras showed a few frames of a white Fiat Uno.
Dodi's plan failed. Six or seven photographers were waiting at the back of the Ritz and several followed the Mercedes.
At 12.20 the Mercedes turned right down the Rue de Rivoli.
Instead of taking the shortest route to Dodi's flat it turned right and followed the bank of the Seine, i.e. away from Dodi's flat.
At 12.23 it reached the dip that curves to the Alma tunnel. Instead of turning right - a reasonable detour to Dodi's flat - the car proceeded down into the tunnel.
A second or so later it crashed against the 13th pillar 64 metres inside the tunnel. Dodi and Henri Paul both died almost immediately.
As the Mercedes drove into the Alma tunnel the paparazzi were 800 to 1200 metres or 90 seconds to 2 minutes behind.
At 12.23.43 Paul Carrill, who was standing on the Place de l'Alma above the entrance to the tunnel, telephoned the emergency services.
By a remarkable coincidence one of the first people on the scene was Dr. Frederic Mailliez, a specialist in emergency medecine.
The first fire engine to the Alma arrived by 12.32. By now the two survivors were being treated by two professionals, Mailliez and an off-duty fire fighter, Dominique Dalby.
By 12.45 there were four ambulances on the scene and many policemen. Unlike the police, no one from the emergency services complained about the behavior of the photographers.
The Paris police chief arrived at around 1.15 and was joined by Patrick Riou head of the Paris Police Judicaire.
Just outside the Alma tunnel, seven of the photographers were placed under arrest.
Around 1.30 the arrested paparazzi were taken to the police station. Their cameras were confiscated and all their negatives seized. Each of the seven were interrogated individually. All told the same story. They had not been close to the Mercedes when it drove into the Alma tunnel.
Realising that some of the paparazzi had left the tunnel fast to sell rolls of film to their agencies, the police raided all the agencies and confiscated every single negative.
A grey Citreon BX was almost certainly in the tunnel travelling in the same direction as the Mercedes. The driver saw the Mercedes skidding towards his car in his tail mirror and accelerated to get out of the way. He claimed that there was also a motor bike in front of the Mercedes zig-zagging to slow it down. The couple say they saw the Mercedes crash and Henri Paul slam into the steering wheel. Yet they did nothing to summon the emergency services and only the next day did they report to the police.
On September 12th they were seen by the investigating magistrate but their evidence was dismissed as very poor. It is interesting that the police never charged this couple under the Good Samaritan law whereby one is required to assist the injured.
Most witnesses were at the other end of the tunnel and eight of the ten witnesses who were closest claimed to have heard two crashes. Whilst others spoke of a car leaving the tunnel in a hurry just after the sound of the crash. Some spoke of a Citroen, others of a Fiat Uno or more precisely a white Fiat Uno.
Many spoke of hearing a loud noise as the car was going into the tunnel and then two crashes, the first a minor crash and the second the fatal one. One witness described the squeal of tyres and then a minor crash.
About 1.20 the bodies of Henri Paul and Dodi were removed to the morgue.
Princess Diana was in an ambulance before 1.15. Dr. Durossi, who was supervising all the rescue crews, considered Diana's condition serious but not critical.
At 2.06 when the ambulance finally arrived at the Salpetriere Diana's condition had deteriorated drastically. At 3.30 she was dead and the French authorities refuse to give details of the treatment she received.
By 2.10 Trevor Rees-Jones was finally freed and rushed to hospital.
Later the Rees-Jones family asked a lawyer, David Crawford, to represent their son. who had never spoken in public since the accident. Crawford was shown the transcript of an interview Juge Stephan conducted with a member of the staff at the Étoile Limousine, (the company who rented the Mercedes to the Ritz), who claimed to have been party to a conversation that had taken place before the crash where it was said it was vital to "get Trevor".
An Italian paper carried a report of an attempt on Rees-Jones's life. On September 10th, two days after a successful operation, he went into a coma. Apparently he had been given three times his usual dose of sedative.
What had Trevor Rees-Jones seen or heard that was potentially so dangerous? When he regained consciousness however he insisted he could remember nothing.
It is routine procedure for a forensic specialist to carry out an examination of the accident vehicle at the scene of a crash. The Mercedes, however, was moved away at about 3.00 in the morning.
Under normal procedure the tunnel would have been closed until all the forensic evidence was gathered. However, an hour after the Mercedes was removed, the street cleaning vehicles entered the tunnel which was re-opened at around 4.30 a.m. The time devoted to seeking evidence was therefore minimal.
It was eventually established that the Mercedes had crashed into the right-hand wall of the tunnel, had been swung into the pillar and then bounced back into the middle of the tunnel. It took seventeen days for the police to question why the Mercedes had hit the right-hand wall.
An off-duty policeman who had joined in the search found fragments of a red tail light piled up near the end of the tunnel. It took seventeen days for this lead to be followed up.
Twelve hours after the crash the traffic police were under intense pressure from the Elysée, the office of the French President.
The wreck of the Mercedes was taken from the tunnel to the IRCGM Forensic laboratory where France's leading forensic experts, François Nibodeau and Bernard Amouroux, started their work a day after the crash and away from the tunnel.
Nibodeau stated that he had been concerned about interference with his enquiries by security services, especially foreign security services.
A number of reconstructions were undertaken and after these experiments Nobideau and his colleagues handed in their report on November lst 1998.
A number of theories have claimed that Henri Paul lost control of the Mercedes as flashes fired outside the car from inside the tunnel blinded him. It seems that there was a flash just outside the tunnel but it appeared to be an ordinary speed camera flash, triggered automatically because the Mercedes was doing more than 60 kilometres an hour.
This photograph was suppressed because it would have cleared up immediately the question of the speed of the Mercedes.
The accident vehicle - the Mercedes S280 - had been stolen in Paris in April. The owners, the Étoile Limousine Company, (the car hire company owned by the Ritz) reported the theft to the police. Some weeks later the police recovered the car with its electronics and braking system ripped out. These were refitted.
If the crash were planned, tampering with the electronics and the braking system would have been the best method. The new system could be set so that it would respond to commands sent by remote control by means of a chip which starts to operate only when a pre-set command is sent on a particular frequency. Once activitated the driver would no longer be in control.
The French enquiry however stated that, having dissected the vehicle, it found no trace of such a chip or of any other kind of sabotage.
After the police claimed they had found nothing of forensic interest in the tunnel, on September 18th they said they were studying shreds of a red tail light picked up in the tunnel, said to be tail light from a Fiat Uno, manufactured between 1983 and September 1989.
Scientists also found two sets of scratches on the Mercedes. On the front door and much larger white scratches on the wing mirror and right side door. The black scratches contained deposits of polypropolene which is used to make the bumpers of many types of cars. The white scratches were more useful as they showed traces of white paint. This compound known as "Blanco 210" had been used on white Fiat Unos made between 1983 and 1987.
Just as the police failed to do basic forensic work they also failed to interview everyone who was a potential witness.
One of the key witnesses, Eric Petel, claimed he was riding home on a new motor bike and was overtaken by the Mercedes as he drove towards the Alma tunnel. He further said that he had not been overtaken by any other car or motor bike and that there were no paparazzi around the car. He did, however, notice flashing headlights from inside the tunnel, which he assumed to be a warning to the Mercedes that there was a speed camera.
As Petel started to go down the curve into the tunnel he heard an implosion, which he thought came from his own exhaust, followed a few seconds later by the deafening sound of the Mercedes crashing.
He stopped, parked his bike by the wall of the tunnel and made for the Mercedes then returned to his bike to summon help and rang the Emergency Services from a nearby phone box.
The emergency operator did not take him seriously and he went to the nearest police station. Here he was treated like an idiot and put in handcuffs for thirty or forty-five minutes.
After being taken to Police Headquarters and waiting about half an hour an inspector questioned him about his description of an "implosion". Finally at close to 6 a.m. a senior official arrived, virtually warned him off and then let him go.
Petel returned home and rang his father, who contacted his lawyer, Antoine Desguines.
On August 31st the police told French journalists to ignore Petel and anything he might have to say, as he was a junkie with a long criminal record.
Maître Antoine Desguines however was impressed by Petel and believed his story. But his efforts to get the magistrate to see Petel met with no success until, seven months later, Petel was granted a meeting with Juge Stephan and retold his story.
Petel was convinced that the crash was not an accident. He believed something happened to the car, and that there was a noise before the final crash.
A photograph exists which was clearly taken by a flash camera outside the tunnel. The flash is a frontal flash showing all the people in the car.
The Paris police who had claimed that the Mercedes had been travelling at 122 mph, i.e. 192, kph were forced to retract their statement when Mercedes-Benz insisted that the speedometer reverted to zero in the event of an accident.
Finally the inquiry accepted that the paparazzi could not have been the cause of the accident. The traffic police were forced to admit that, if the Mercedes had really been going fast, anyone close behind could not have avoided becoming involved in the accident.
Why did the French authorities suppress Petel's story? Was this in order to blame the photographers thereby enabling them to seize their negatives and effectively muzzle them?
Was the confiscation of their photographs done out of a delicacy of feeling or a desire to destroy all evidence?
With the paparazzi no longer the culprits, thirty six hours after the crash a new culprit was found. The driver, Henri Paul - the drunk with enough alcohol in his blood to be twice the legal limit in the UK plus two kinds of medication for depression.
Born in July 1936, with an excellent school record, he was described by the hotel management as a model employee. He did his National Service and learnt to fly with an instrument rating.
In 1985 Henri Paul left Brittany for Paris and was employed at the Ritz.
Three days before he died Henri Paul undertook a medical examination to renew his pilot's licence. The doctor declared his reflexes and general health were good.
Private flying is not a hobby for the poor and he could not have managed to do much on his basic salary of £3,000 a month. Dodi had a plane which he was allowed to borrow.
His bank accounts prove he could afford to fly. He had three million french francs, then about three hundred thousand pounds in thirteen separate bank accounts. In the eight months before the crash 40,000 francs, roughly 4,400 pounds, was paid into a Caisse d'Epargne account on five occasions, each time in cash.
It was obvious that Henri Paul was not dependent upon his official job. It seemed he was freelancing for various intelligence services, including the British and Israeli secret service.
His address book contained contact numbers for people at the Directoire de la Securite du Territoire, the Renseignements Generaux and, most remarkable, in the office of the French President.
At 9.53 p.m on August 30th video footage shows Henri Paul parking his car and entering the Ritz hotel at 10.09 p.m.
Henri Paul spent some of the next two hours sitting in the hotel bar with the two bodyguards, Trevor Rees-Jones and Ken Wingfield. Certainly if he had shown any sign of being under the influence, they would not have allowed him to drive.
Later, although Trevor Rees-Jones claimed to have forgotten everything, he nevertheless insisted Henri Paul was not drunk.
His body was taken to the Institut Medico Legal, the most prestigious pathological lab linked with the University of Paris. Its head, Professor Dominique Lecompte, France's top pathologist, and Dr. Gilbert Pepin worked on the autopsy.
The autopsy started around 8.30 on Sunday morning and even before the process finished details were leaked to the Press.
In addition to alcohol he appeared to have taken Prozac and Tiapride. Neither of these are the drugs of a fit and healthy 41-year old. Nor had the medical test for the pilot's licence three days earlier picked up the presence of either drug.
Unusually after the first samples taken on Sunday, more were taken on September lst and again on September 4th.
Although the autopsy results seemed very definite, on 4th September, five days after the crash, the magistrate, Herve Stephan, requested a second set of samples. He also wanted checks on the astonishing levels of carbon monoxide in Henri Paul's blood.
On 5th September he ordered a further set of samples. On September 8th Juge Stephan asked Professor Lecompte the exact conditions and the precise place from which the samples were taken.
Henri Paul's family tried to have an independent post mortem carried out but the request was refused by the French authorities.
In addition an error in the preserving of samples made it impossible to check the DNA.
Al Fayed then employed three independent expert pathologists who found numerous omissions in the post mortem.
The presence of carbon monoxide (said to be 20.7 per cent) puzzled all three experts and suggested either: (a) exposure to high levels of carbon monoxide; (b) an analytical error; or (c) a mix-up in the samples.
Twenty-three bodies went through the morgue on the night of August 30th/3lst. The relevant documents giving the names and addresses of the bodies are held now under strict security in the Ministry of Justice.
Three witnesses claimed to have seen a white Fiat Uno. It would have been basic police technique to search a data base of registered Fiat Unos and to see if any of the paparazzi came up as Fiat Uno owners.
The police enquiry however did not do this.
It was Macnamara, ex Scotland Yard, who alerted the French Police that one of the paparazzi who had been following Diana all through the summer owned a white Fiat Uno. The French police however advised the recently retired chief superintendent that if he interfered again with French police enquiries he would be charged with a criminal offence.
One of the most successful photographers in the press pack was James Andanson. He had a white Fiat Uno usually kept at his farm in central France.
It appears he had sold the car a month after the accident and it was found in a garage. It certainly fitted the "old and shabby" description given by the witnesses and had been fitted with a new rear light.
In his final summary Juge Stephan noted that the white Fiat Uno had never been found and did not mention Andanson.
Born in 1946. His real name was Jean Paul Gonin but he adopted his wife's name "Andanson" when he married.
He was one of the founders of the Sigma Photo Agency and by 1997 one of the most successful paparazzi in the world with many contacts including those linked in the arms trade such as Adnan Khashoggi, the ex-brother-in-law of Mohamed Al Fayed. (Dodi's father and his uncle fell out in the 1970s after the divorce of Kashnoggi's sister, although Dodi remained close to his uncle.)
Another of Andanson's connections was the socialist premier, Beregovoy, who was found in a canal with a bullet through his head, supposedly suicide, after the elections on May lst 1993.
Andanson was apparently at Nevers on the day Beregovoy died. Indeed many of the people he photographed were involved in violent deaths. It was considered likely that James Andanson did not work alone but was handled by security services, British or French or those of other nationalities.
Andanson had confided to certain people that he had been in the tunnel at the time of the crash and had caught the last moments of the Princess in the tunnel.
At least two witnesses claimed that the Fiat was zigzagging on the road in front of the Mercedes.
When the French police had their attention drawn to Andanson's Fiat by Al Fayed's detectives, they went down to his house. The reason the police gave for their lack of interest was that the paint on the Fiat Uno did not match the paint found on the Mercedes and, even if they had matched, it proved nothing.
Andanson, when questioned by the police, changed his story twice. The story Andanson told the police about his Fiat Uno was also contradictory. The French police did not press Andanson too hard on any alibis.
On May 4th 2000 James Andanson apparently drove in his BMW, bought petrol and set fire to himself in a town 600 kilometres south of his farm in Lignieres.
The police enquiry was very simple and was concluded on June 7th 2000. There was no question that Andanson had been murdered or indeed that he was alive. It was not clear whether it was Andanson at all, allegedly only ash was found and it would take more than a jerry can of petrol to reduce a body to ashes. What they should have found was a burnt skeleton.
Apparently the jerry can was bought on his credit card which had not been reduced to ashes because it was used three days after he died and then again seven days later.
The possessions of accident victims are carefully recorded.
On Princess Diana they found certain items of jewelery and, according to one report, cocaine in her handbag.
Dodi had 1,000 French francs on his body (about £110) but absolutely nothing else - no papers, no wallet, not even his cigarette lighter and certainly no mobile phone although he was known to be permanently glued to his phone.
The most startling find on Henri Paul's body was a relatively large sum of money 12,560 French francs (about £1,400).
In the context of Henri Paul's secret service connections, the fact that he had with him a large sum of money suggested that he had just come from a meeting with one of his security handlers.
Why did Dodi specifically ask Henri Paul to act as chauffeur?
Why did he bypass normal security regulations?
Was he acting on instructions from another party?
Was it because he wanted to go somewhere and preferred his father didn't know?
Why did the car take the route it did which entailed using the Alma Tunnel?
Was it because the turning was blocked by motor cycle riders (as claimed by Brenda Wells, a witness who has never been traced)?
Was it because the Mercedes was going to call somewhere else before returning to the flat? (In support of this theory it seems that Dodi had fixed to go to a meeting at the Passy Kennedy building about a mile on from the Alma tunnel.)
Did the car brake and what was the minor crash?
Why did it take forty minutes to prise Princess Diana lose?
Why did the ambulance stop twice en route to the hospital?
Why did the police fail to do any basic forensic work and not interview properly many of the witnesses?
Why the mess-up over the autopsy on Henri Paul and the determination to shift the blame on to him?
It is hardly credible that the French police are normally that inefficient. Their actions argue that the inefficiency was deliberate and orchestrated. But by whom? Certainly a group powerful enough to silence all attempts on both sides of the Channel to obtain the truth whatever that might be.
Was she the target?
Having found herself as a young woman in the unhappy situation of having entered unwittingly into a marriage of convenience, Princess Diana became an excellent object for manipulation by friends and confidantes.
She was under the delusion that the Media was her ally but in effect she was used as a weapon against the monarchy, bearing in mind that monarchies have always been prime targets.
It is strange that her "confidantes" were two older women.
A quick glance at the background of Rosa Monckton is illuminating. Rosa Monckton who spent time with her in August before the crash in the Alma tunnel.
The Moncktons are a British "spy" family and an example of recently acquired social status. Her grand-father worked for King Edward V111 and kept a close eye on him on behalf of the security services.
Whatever it's role initially MI6 is no longer an English Secret Service. It has links with both the CIA and Mossad, which means of course that the business it undertakes is not necessarily concerned with the good of the nation. The CIA for instance had a 1000+ page dossier on Princess Diana made over several years.
Rosa Monckton's brother, Anthony Monckton, was a serving MI6 officer, and her husband, Dominic Lawson, is Jewish and the son of "Lord" Lawson (one time Chancellor of the Exchequer and Vanessa Salmon, heiress to the Lyons Corner House empire, while his sister is wife of Charles Saatchi - the Jewish advertising family.)
From 1995 until 2005 Lawson was editor of the Sunday Telegraph, a newspaper in the Hollinger newspaper chain.( i.e. Conrad Black - again Jewish - who at this moment faces a lengthy stretch in jail for embezzlement.)
Given her background and her connections the question must be asked did Rosa Monckton move in the Princess's inner circle and become her confidante for reasons other than friendship?
The other close friend was Lucia Tarso Flecha da Lima the wife of the Brazilian Ambassador against whose name a question mark must also be placed. Brazil is well and truly in the hands of the "globalists".
Dodi Al Fayed was a wealthy playboy with a dubious reputation. His father's insistence that the crash was engineered is surely based on knowledge not readily available. Mohamed al Fayed's connections are interesting.
In 1953, GHW Bush and Mohamed Al Fayed were directors of the Singer Sewing Machine Company and later GHW Bush's name would be linked with Khasnoggi's in the Iran-contra affair and both had ties with George de Mohrenschildt, the CIA agent and Lee Harvey Oswald's sponsor in the United States when he returned from the Soviet Union.
In 1964 Mohamed Al Fayed was the business partner of CIA agent George de Mohrenschildt in Haiti.
During the 1970s Adnan Khasnoggi (Mohamed al Fayed's brother-in-law at that time) was the conduit for about 80 percent of all foreign defence systems in Saudi Arabia In 1973 a Pentagon official praised Khashoggi's work for his assistance in the Middle East.
And last but not least Dr. Kissinger who had strong ties with de Mohrenschildt was the one who appointed GHW Bush CIA Director in 1975.
Who are the largest suppliers of land mines? Britain and the USA.
As mentioned above Henri Paul had secret service connections, though it is unlikely he was a willing party to his own demise. It is possible that both he and Trevor Rees-Jones may have known too much.
The precise answer to "why?" may probably never be known. One thing is certain that some of the occupants of the ill-fated vehicle had become a liability to somebody.
As to "who?"- MI6? CIA? French Intelligence? Or Mossad who controls all three?