Prince Harry has claimed that “a lot of things are unexplained” about his mother’s death 26 years on, as he revealed new details about the Royal family’s response to the tragedy.
The Prince said he still had questions about the reason Princess Diana’s driver lost control of the Mercedes in which she was travelling when she was killed in Paris in 1997.
Conspiracy theories about the accident in the Alma tunnel have raged ever since, the most outlandish of them a suggestion by Mohamed Fayed, whose son Dodi also died in the crash, that Prince Philip ordered the security services to assassinate the couple.
The Prince, who reveals in his book, Spare, that he asked to be driven at speed through the same tunnel, said he believed it was “almost physically impossible to lose control of a vehicle unless you are completely blinded at the wheel”.
The Prince said he did not see any point in opening another inquiry “at this stage” as he also revealed that he was shown pictures from the official police report at his own request.
Speaking to ITV’s Tom Bradby for Prince Harry: The Interview, the Duke of Sussex said he decided to be driven through the Alma tunnel in 2007 because “there were still so many question marks that were unanswered, especially from the inquest”.
He said he believed that if the paparazzi had not been following his mother’s car the “end result” would not have happened.
He told Bradby: “There’s a lot of things that are unexplained. I’ve been asked before whether I want to open up another inquiry. I don’t really see the point at this stage.”
The Princess’s car crashed into a pillar in the middle of the tunnel as it was being driven at more than twice the speed limit by a Ritz Hotel security boss who was more than three times over the drink-drive limit.
After being driven through the tunnel at the same speed – 65mph – the Prince concluded that “there was no danger of anybody losing control even after a drink or a couple of drinks, almost physically impossible to lose control of a vehicle unless you are completely blinded at the wheel”.
He said he had been driving his own car when “I would have paparazzi literally jump on the bonnet of the car and I physically couldn’t see anything”, and “you assume your mother’s driver was experiencing [the same thing] at the time” it made it hard for him to understand how “some people” came to the conclusions they did about what happened that night.
He added: “The people that were predominantly responsible for it, all got away with it.”
In his book, the Prince describes the moment his father came into his bedroom at Balmoral and sat on the end of his bed to tell him that: “I’m afraid she didn’t make it.”
He told Bradby: “Sitting in that sunken bed at Balmoral Castle, I took myself back to that moment and tried to remember as much as possible. My father coming in in his dressing gown and sharing that news with me…and the compassion that I have for him as a parent having to sit with that for many, many hours, ringing up friends of his, trying to work out ‘how the hell do I break this to my two sons?’ And I never want to be in that position.”
He said that when they walked the same route behind Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin he and his brother joked that “at least we know the way”, but where his grandmother had “finished life” his mother “was taken away far too young”.
Read more via The Telegraph
