The Royalist - Speculation Rages Over The Diana Crash Report

Speculation Rages Over The Diana Crash Report

Written by Joanne Leyland

Sunday, 04 June 2006

Speculation, speculation, speculation....that's all we're as yet hearing with regard to the findings of Operation Paget, the official British investigation into the events surrounding the death of Diana.

But that hasn't stopped several Sunday newspapers here in the UK running stories about what Sir John Stevens will report when he hands over his initial findings to the Royal Coroner, Michael Burgess, in around August.

The Sunday papers are full of conflicting reports on the findings of Operation Paget, the investigation led by Sir John Stevens into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

The News of the World goes all out with the claim that Diana was not murdered, pregnant or engaged.

Meanwhile, the Mail on Sunday is reporting that British investigators are to carry out DNA tests on a tiny amount of blood found in the crashed Mercedes to try to establish whether it is the blood of a pregnant woman.

Not for the first time we hear the claim of one of Diana's best friends, Rosa Monckton, who has repeatedly intonated that, having spent a holiday with Diana in mid-August, she knows for certain that it was biologically impossible for Diana to have been pregnant.

The Mail also claims friends and colleagues of driver Henri Paul say he didn't touch a drop of drink in the hours before he was purported to have drunkenly crashed the Mercedes, instantly killing himself and Dodi Al Fayed. Paul's ex-girlfriend, Laurence Pujol, is said to have told the British team that he rarely drank on duty.

The Sunday Express has a report which is actually a partial re-run of an old story.

A former MI6 "spy", Richard Tomlinson, has long claimed that the crash which killed Diana was a "carbon copy" of a plan MI6 drew up to kill Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

According to Tomlinson, Scotland Yard detectives have told him that his "bombshell evidence" does indeed match that contained within files handed over by MI6.

Tomlinson claims Diana attracted the attentions of the Secret Intelligence Service due to her campaign to implement a ban on landmines, a trade which is worth billions to Governments worldwide: "It was made clear to me by the detectives my evidence could be the tipping point that showed how Diana died, and why. They took me step-by-step through all I knew on MI6 files about the deaths. I told them the plot to get rid of Diana was modelled on the one MI6 had created to assassinate the late President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia in 1992."

"I gave the Yard detectives the name of the senior MI6 officer who had written the minute of the Milosevic plan which was then placed in the Diana file. One detective confirmed that everything I had said was 'absolutely true'."

"I said I had seen the MI6 file that confirms Henri Paul, the driver of the Mercedes in which Diana and Dodi died, had been blinded by a high-powered flashlight as he drove through the Paris underpass. This was a technique that is consistent with MI6 methods used in other assassinations. More important, it is the same method described in the minute that deals with the proposed assassination of Slobodan Milosevic."

According to the Express, which has been mocked in some quarters (especially inside the media) for its long campaign to discover "the truth" of how and why Diana died, a French intelligence officer has admitted: "We know Tomlinson has told the truth. It is going to be very embarrassing for MI6 when this all comes out."

Clearly, all we can do is wait to make up our own minds when the final report is revealed in the months to come, although that clearly won't stop many more "exclusive" stories being revealed in the days and weeks ahead by the increasingly excited British Press.

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