The Mammoth Book of New Csi (45 page)

At 3 p.m., Paul drove Dodi al-Fayed’s Range Rover to Le Bourget airport and collected the staff accompanying the couple and their baggage, which he took to Dodi’s apartment in the Rue Arsène Houssaye. Dodi’s usual chauffeur, Philippe Dourneau, collected Diana and Dodi in a hired Mercedes S600, accompanied by Trevor Rees-Jones, Dodi’s principal bodyguard.

Security staff were on duty at the Ritz to deal with the paparazzi and Paul asked another chauffeur, Jean-François Musa, to be on duty outside the Ritz at 5 p.m. Henri Paul asked Musa to drive Dodi al-Fayed to Repossi jewellers in Place Vendôme opposite the Ritz, which he did. At about 6 p.m., Paul told Musa to drive the Range Rover for the rest of the evening, while Philippe Dourneau drove the Mercedes S600.

At around 7 p.m., Paul told night security officer François Tendil, who had just come on duty, that he was finishing work for the day. Diana and Dodi had already left the hotel by then and Paul told him that the couple were not expected to return. They had gone to Dodi’s apartment, where they drank champagne, and they had a reservation at the restaurant Chez Benoit. If there was any change of plan, Paul said he could be contacted by mobile phone. He then left the Ritz.

At 7.30 p.m., Paul was seen in the Bar de Bourgogne in the Rue des Petits Champs near to his home. However, the staff there said they did not see him that night. The owner of a bar called Le Champmeslé, about 55 yards (50 m) from the Bar de Bourgogne, did see Paul. He came in for a short time around 9.30 p.m., but did not have a drink. He did not appear to be drunk and arranged to meet up with friends at the Bar de Bourgogne at around midnight.

As Dodi and Diana could not shake the large posse of paparazzi, they had decided not to eat at Chez Benoit and returned to the Ritz instead. Tendil called Paul, who returned to the hotel at 10 p.m. The couple decided not to eat in the hotel restaurant and had food brought to them in the Imperial Suite, while their bodyguards went to the Bar Vendôme in the hotel, where Paul later joined them.

“He got himself a drink at the bar and came to sit down with us,” said Trevor Rees-Jones. “He had a drink, I do not know what it was, but it was yellow-coloured . . . After a while, Paul had another drink.”

According to the bill and the barmen at the Bar Vendôme, Paul drank two Ricards. The instructions came from Dodi al-Fayed that Paul should arrange for a third car to be waiting at the rear of the hotel in the Rue Cambon. The two cars at the front of the hotel would act as decoys. No instructions were given as to who would drive the third car and it is not clear at which point Paul took it upon himself to drive. There was no reason to think that Paul was drunk and none of the security officers or senior staff at the hotel objected, though Trevor Rees-Jones thought it was a bad idea to head off in a single car with no backup. Dodi did not even want to take Rees-Jones with him, but agreed when the bodyguards dug their heels in.

Bodyguard Kieran Wingfield told the French enquiry: “I noticed that Henri Paul had just smoked a cigar, I could smell it on his breath. I am positive, he did not smell of alcohol and his behaviour was perfectly normal.”

Later, he told Operation Paget: “He wasn’t drunk. There was no slurring of his words and when he walked up the corridor he wasn’t falling around. He was quite tactile – he would touch your arm when he was talking to you – and he stood very close to me. I don’t smoke and neither does Trevor and I was close enough to smell cigars on him but not drink.”

Wingfield then went down to the front of the hotel to give the paparazzi the impression that Diana and Dodi would be coming out in fifteen minutes.

Jean-François Musa was worried by the choice of Paul as the driver of the third car, but only because he did not have a “Grande Remise” licence, the special licence to drive limousines.

At 12.17 a.m., CCTV caught Henri Paul leaving the Rue Cambon exit of the Ritz with Diana, Dodi and Trevor Rees-Jones. Paul took over from chauffeur Frédéric Lucard who had delivered the car. Before he drove away, Lucard heard Paul say to the photographers: “Don’t try to follow us; in any case you won’t catch us.”

Then he drove off.

Off-duty physician Dr Frédéric Maillez arrived on the scene almost immediately after the crash. He noted that the driver was “stuck in the twisted metal and had no illusions about his condition”. At 12.32 a.m., Sergeant Xavier Gourmelon of the Fire Service, who was trained in medical emergencies, made his initial assessment and noted that the driver was in cardiac arrest, trapped, inaccessible and apparently dead. Eight minutes later Dr Armaud Derossi with Service d’Aide Médicale Urgente, or the Urgent Medical Aid Service, also noted that the driver was dead. His body was taken directly to the mortuary at the Institut Médico-Légal (IML) at 2 Place Mazas, Paris, where it was given the identification number 2147. Dodi al-Fayed was pronounced dead at the scene and was also taken to the IML mortuary where his body was given the identification number 2146. The Princess of Wales and Trevor Rees-Jones, who were both still alive at the scene, were taken to the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital for emergency medical treatment.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Maud Coujard turned up at the scene and requested Professor Dominique Lecomte, an expert on the list of the Paris Court of Appeal, to carry out a full autopsy of Henri Paul to ascertain the circumstances and causes of death, and to seek any evidence of an offence. Commandant Jean-Claude Mulès, an officer with the Brigade Criminelle who was present at the scene of the crash, also attended the postmortem. Professor Lecomte found that Paul had no lesions to the organs, notably the heart or brain, that would suggest a preexisting condition. The injuries found were primarily traumatic in nature with “a rupture of the spinal cord and rupture of the descending aorta”. She also noted multiple fractures, primarily to the spinal column, the ribcage, pelvis and legs, that were consistent with trauma.

But there were some discrepancies in the post-mortem report. Professor Lecomte recorded Paul’s body weight as 73 kg and height as 1.72 m, while Commandant Mulès recorded his body weight as 76 kg and his height as 1.67 m. Professor Lecomte told the French investigation that the autopsy began at 8 a.m., but told Operation Paget that it was 8.30 a.m..

Peter Vanezis, a professor of forensic medical science called in by Mohamed al-Fayed, criticized the post-mortem, saying that the place on the body from which blood samples had been taken was not recorded. Nor was it mentioned whether the blood had been stored in appropriately refrigerated conditions, while samples of the urine, vitreous humour and bile that had been taken were not analysed.

The blood was divided into two and sent to two different laboratories. One sample showed a high level of alcohol.

“A high blood alcohol in one sample may occur for a number of reasons other than from the intake of the appropriate amount into the body to give such a high level,” said Professor Vanezis. “The action of bacteria in blood, the presence of high sugar, sampling from an area close to the stomach or from the portal vein may all give an exaggerated inordinately high reading. There are well-documented cases with high alcohol levels with no evidence that the appropriate amounts of alcohol to account for such levels had been ingested.”

In a letter to Mohamed al-Fayed, Patrice Mangin, professor of legal medicine and director of the Institute of Legal Medicine at Lausanne University, also pointed out the shortcomings of the post-mortem report. While it had been said that Paul had been consuming alcohol to excess for up to a week before the crash, the autopsy report did not include biological analyses of the liver, or even the pancreas or other viscera.

“In such a case, it seems to me of the most elementary investigation,” he said.

He also noted the high levels of carboxyhaemoglobin in the blood – caused by inhaling carbon monoxide – which Professor Lecomte and independent toxicologist Dr Gilbert Pépin had not been able to explain.

On 4 September 1997, a second post-mortem was performed by Dr Jean-Pierre Campana, a pathologist, on the orders of Judge Stéphan, who was present along with Dr Pépin and three police officers. The judge did this because the blood alcohol levels recorded by the police toxicologist Dr Ivan Ricordel had come as a surprise. However, Dr Pépin confirmed that they were correct. In this case, the blood was taken from the femoral artery in the thigh. Professor Lecomte had taken her blood samples from the heart and the chest.

In the blood samples from the first post-mortem, Dr Ricordel had found a blood alcohol level of 1.87 grams per litre – this was well over the French drink-driving limit of 0.5 grams per litre and the British limit of 0.8 grams per litre. Dr Pépin found 1.74 grams per litre less than two hours later, after Dr Ricordel’s findings had been contested by Mohamed al-Fayed and his lawyers.

Dr Pépin was asked by the examining magistrate to do a full toxicology report after the second post-mortem. Again he found a blood alcohol level of 1.74 grams per litre. There were high levels of alcohol in his stomach and urine. Pépin also found traces of prescription drugs in his system and a very high level of carboxyhaemoglobin in his bloodstream. It was thought that Paul inhaled carbon monoxide produced by the triggering of the airbags in the car. This also explained why the level in the cardiac or chest cavity blood – 20.7 per cent – was much higher than that found in the femoral blood – 12.8 per cent – as the heart and chest are much closer to the lungs and Paul would only have breathed in the carbon monoxide from the airbags in the last moments of his life. During the crash he would have breathed in involuntarily and the gas would have been forced into his lungs. Some of the carboxyhaemoglobin would also have been produced by the cigars he smoked. The air in the middle of Paris – like that in any big city – would contain carbon monoxide and there was also the possibility that the samples were contaminated in the laboratory.

The experts employed by Mohamed al-Fayed dismiss this explanation. They said that Paul could not have breathed in enough carbon monoxide from the airbags as he died instantly. Nor did he smoke heavily enough, and if he had the levels of alcohol and carbon monoxide found in his blood before the crash he would have been seen staggering in the CCTV footage from the Ritz. If Henri Paul drank as heavily as was alleged, there would have been damage to his liver. But the second autopsy showed that his liver was perfectly healthy. While Prozac and Tiapridal, which Paul was prescribed, were found in his blood, albendazole was found in samples of his hair. Albendazole is a drug used to treat intestinal worms, not a condition Paul was known to have been suffering from. This raised the possibility that the samples being tested did not come from Henri Paul, but rather from an alcoholic who had committed suicide by inhaling the exhaust from a car. However, carboxyhaemoglobin levels found in the blood of suicides is usually around 50 per cent, not the 20 per cent found. Nevertheless, DNA tests were ordered by Judge Thierry Bellancourt, who had taken over the case in France. These established that the blood did, indeed, come from Henri Paul.

Although it is clear that the two Ricards that Paul drank after his return to the Ritz would not have caused the high level of alcohol in his blood or left him incapable of driving, the obvious conclusion was that he had been drinking between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. when he was away from the hotel. It is estimated that he could have drunk six measures of Ricard in that period.

According to Mohamed al-Fayed, there were ten CCTV cameras along the route taken by the Mercedes, including one above the Alma tunnel itself, but no footage from those cameras had been forthcoming. On the orders of Judge Stéphan, Lieutenant Eric Gigou of the Brigade Criminelle followed the route and found that there were indeed ten cameras along the way, but they were mainly security cameras trained on the entrances to buildings. Most did not belong to the Parisian authorities but to the owners of the buildings and were operated privately by them. None of the footage captured by them was relevant.

There was a traffic-monitoring camera above the underpass in the Place de l’Alma. It was operated by the Compagnie de Circulation Urbaines de Paris – the Paris Urban Traffic Unit. But that department closed down at about 11 p.m. It had no night-duty staff and made no recordings. Officers in the Police Headquarters Information and Command Centre could continue to view the pictures shown by the traffic camera in real time, but could not control it. And there was no reason for those in the overnight control room in Paris to be viewing that camera before the crash.

There were no known video recordings or photographic images of the Mercedes on its final journey between the Ritz hotel and the Alma underpass. No official images surfaced and no unofficial ones appeared in any media. There was evidence that the French investigators took steps at an early stage to identify any such evidence but were unable to find any.

Mohamed al-Fayed also maintained that there was a speed camera that would have taken a flash photograph of the Mercedes, if it had been speeding. Officers from Operation Paget found that there was no speed camera in the Alma tunnel at the time. The paparazzi had flash cameras, but they were following the car, not in front of it. An eyewitness to the crash, who was walking near the entrance to the tunnel, said that he saw no speed cameras nor any police officers carrying out speed checks. The Brigade Criminelle recorded the location of all portable speed cameras in use that night and officers from Operation Paget were satisfied that they were all elsewhere and none of them produced any pictures relevant to the enquiry.

A letter from Lewis Silkin, Mohamed al-Fayed’s solicitor, to the coroner said: “Another photo apparently exists which was taken by a vehicle in front of the Mercedes in the tunnel showing Mr Paul and Trevor Rees-Jones.”

Officers from Operation Paget believed that the photograph in question was one of the two shot by Jacques Langevin at the rear of the Ritz in Rue Cambon, not in the Alma underpass. They found no photograph of the Mercedes entering the tunnel.

Eyewitnesses said that they saw a vehicle that stopped the Mercedes taking the exit on the Cours Albert 1er – the route a driver would normally have taken to the Rue Arsène Houssaye – forcing it into the Alma tunnel. But officers found their evidence conflicting. However, they concluded that a motorcycle was in a position that would have made it difficult to take the exit. The collision investigator assigned to Operation Paget also concluded that the Mercedes was going too fast to take the exit. By the time the Mercedes reached the slip road, the driver had already lost control. But it would have been possible to exit there if he had slowed down as there were no other vehicles blocking the slip road.