The Mammoth Book of New Csi (46 page)

A driver named François Levistre said he saw a bright flash of white light in the tunnel before the crash. However, Operation Paget concluded: “It is questionable whether he could have seen the detail of what he claimed to have seen inside the underpass.”

Levistre recounted a large amount of detail seen in his rearview mirror while driving through an underpass at speeds of around 120 to 125 km/h (74 to 78 mph). He was also negotiating the slip road to join the main carriageway, an action that would have required his full attention, regardless of his speed. His wife, who was in the car with him, contradicted parts of his account. The French enquiry discounted François Levistre’s evidence.

Another eyewitness, Brian Anderson, described seeing a flash immediately before hearing a bang or explosion and the screeching of car tyres. He could not be specific about the location or source of the flash, saying he only saw it “out of the extreme corner of my left eye”.

The consultants at the Transport Research Laboratory carried out a technical reconstruction of the collision and concluded that the Mercedes was between 60 and 105 m (200 and 345 ft) from the beginning of the underpass when the driver, Henri Paul, began to perceive the hazard presented by another vehicle, such as the Fiat Uno, and saw the need to take avoiding action. Allowing for human reaction times, the driver began to respond to the hazard of an obstruction 30 to 60 m (100 to 200 ft) before entering the underpass.

The chain of events that led to the crash started some way from the entrance to the underpass. By the time the Mercedes approached the thirteenth pillar, the collision was inevitable. The physical evidence of tyre marks, vehicle debris patterns, points of collision from the scene and the marks identified on the Mercedes car supported this view. So if there was a bright light inside the underpass near the Mercedes, and particularly near the thirteenth pillar, it could not have caused the crash. Curiously, Anderson was adamant that he had not seen the white Fiat Uno that other eyewitnesses insist was at the scene.

Other witnesses spoke of seeing bright flashing lights outside the underpass, but none described a blinding effect. Many eyewitnesses who would have been in a position to see a powerful light or flashes made no reference to them.

The examination of vehicle debris at the scene in the Alma underpass, together with samples taken from the Mercedes door, side panels and wing mirror, indicated that a white Fiat Uno was involved in the crash. Immediately afterwards, it was seen emerging from the tunnel being driven in an erratic fashion. The driver never came forward and, although the French enquiry checked 4,668 similar vehicles, it was never identified.

Of particular interest was the white Fiat Uno belonging to James Andanson, a photojournalist who had been in St Tropez that summer photographing the Princess of Wales. On 4 May 2000, his body was found in his burnt-out BMW in a forest in the south of France. The official verdict was suicide, but Mohamed al-Fayed maintained that Andanson was working for the SIS and had been murdered by them as part of the cover-up. Or, if he had committed suicide, it was because his conscience was troubled by the part he had played in the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed.

However, Operation Paget found no evidence to place him in Paris on the night of 30 August. He was at his home in Lignières, some 170 miles (274 km) south of Paris, and left at about 4 a.m. on Sunday, 31 August 1997, to fly to Corsica for a prearranged appointment. His wife, Elisabeth Andanson, corroborated his alibi. There was no evidence that his Fiat Uno was in Paris either. It also seems to have been in Lignières. The French authorities carried out forensic tests on paint and bumper samples taken from his Fiat Uno and compared them to samples taken from the wreck of the Mercedes. Their conclusion was that, although the bumper material and some of the paint samples were compatible, there was no damage to the Uno, so the car was eliminated from their enquiries.

Officers from Operation Paget looked into the circumstances surrounding Andanson’s death. When the fire brigade put out the fire, they found Andanson’s headless body in the driver’s seat. The head lay between the two front seats. Although this sounded suspicious, Eric Baccino, the pathologist who attended the crime scene, said that his head could have been detached by the intense heat of the blaze. There was a hole in the left temple. But no missile or projectile was found. During the autopsy, no subdural bleeding was found and Professor Baccino concluded that the hole in James Andanson’s head was caused from the inside by the intense heat, and not from the outside by a blow or foreign object. Dr Richard Shepherd, adviser on pathology to Operation Paget, confirmed this explanation.

The French pathologists also noted that the “residual muscular masses at the cervical level and the level of the buttocks have a pinkish colouration such as those found during carbon monoxide poisoning, which signifies that the person was alive at the time the fire started”. The post-mortem also found no evidence of violence.

A helicopter was used in the crime scene investigation and aerial photographs revealed that there was only one set of tyre tracks heading into the scene – those of the BMW. There was no evidence that anyone else had been involved in his death.

The vehicle registration plates had been destroyed in the fire. The vehicle was identified through a serial number etched on to one of the windows. The examining magistrate then ordered an examination of the burnt-out vehicle to determine the cause of the fire.

Stéphane Calderara, Guillaume Cognon and Philippe Malaquin of the Institute of Criminal Research of the National Gendarmerie carried out the examination. They reported: “We proceed with testing for the presence of inflammable products using a hydrocarbon detector. This proves positive in the area of the front floor pan . . . It should be noted that nothing is discovered that would indicate a criminal act.”

The car had been doused with petrol and set on fire. An accidental or technical cause for the fire was ruled out.

Andanson had made preparations for his suicide. That morning, he left at home his wallet, Cartier watch, mobile telephone and his attaché case, all things that he would have normally carried. At some point during the day, he posted a letter to Sipa Press agency asking for all of his photographic royalties to be put into his wife’s name. The letter was stamped at the Lignières Post Office on 4 May 2000 and arrived at the agency the next day.

His bank statement revealed that his bank card was used to make a purchase of 608 francs – about £60 – at the Géant Service Station in Millau at 3.36 p.m. There were no precise details of what he purchased, however the French investigation concluded the value of the transaction was more than was necessary to fill the fuel tank of his car. Andanson was known to carry fuel containers in his vehicle. Millau was just 12 miles (19 km) from Les Louettes in the commune of Nant, where the burnt-out car was found. Andanson had stayed at the Hotel Campanile in Millau across the road from the petrol station two months earlier when he had been on a photographic assignment 550 yards (500 m) from Les Louettes.

James Andanson would normally have had numerous appointments recorded in his diary for the coming days and weeks. However, his appointment with Sophie Deniau at 4 p.m. was the last. She arrived at Sipa in Paris as arranged, waited for an hour, then left.

Long-standing friends and associates interviewed during the French investigation said that Andanson had talked of committing suicide and described the manner in which he would do so. Jean-Gabriel Barthélémy, a photographer who had known Andanson since 1972, said that when they were in Gstaad, Switzerland, together ten years earlier, Andanson had told him that if anything happened to his wife he would kill himself by pouring petrol from a canister in his car boot and lighting it with the end of his cigar. He said that Andanson often talked about committing suicide and of his worries about the financing of his son’s career as a racing driver.

Franck Doveri, a friend of twelve years, saw Andanson in Klosters a month before his death. During a conversation with another photographer whose wife had left him, Andanson said that if his own wife ever left him he would put a bullet in his head.

Sophie Deniau, who bought photographs from Andanson, recalled a conversation with him on 18 April 2000 – sixteen days before he died – where he said that if anything were to happen to a member of his family he would not be able to live with himself and he would commit suicide by sitting in his car with a good cigar and setting fire to himself.

Christian Maillard of Sipa Press, a friend of James Andanson since 1988, said that during a conversation about ten days before his death, Andanson had told him that he was thinking of committing suicide by creating an explosion in his car. Maillard told him not to say such things, but Andanson insisted that he would be able to do it.

During the French investigation into Andanson’s death, a tape was recovered from his home. On it, he stated that he was unhappy and that he worried about his son’s safety and how he would continue to finance his motor-racing career. During 1999, Andanson had personally sponsored his son to the tune of 750,000 francs (£75,000).

Elisabeth Andanson was sure that her husband’s death was suicide.

“Frankly and honestly I think he did it for professional and financial reasons,” she told the police. “There were the far-reaching changes in the press which worried him a lot and about which he was right to be worried. Our son had become champion of France a year after starting out in motor sport and that involved expenditure. Furthermore, my husband was having trouble adapting to the changes in the press, in which the use of digital technology was one of his concerns. My husband started to age, and he was tired. Even though he expressed his concerns to me fairly often, he never followed my advice.”

When Elisabeth Andanson was told of Mohamed al-Fayed’s claim that her husband committed suicide because of his conscience over the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed, she said: “You tell me that it has been suggested that James committed suicide because he had been involved in the accident that cost the lives of Diana, Princess of Wales, Dodi al-Fayed and Henri Paul and he felt guilty: that is absurd, and it is people who do not know the facts that must have said that. I had never heard of this.”

Six weeks after Andanson’s death, his offices at the Sipa news agency were robbed by three armed men. One of them shot the security guard through the foot. Forcing those present to reveal the security codes, they searched the second and third floors. They took the Visa and Eurocard of Marek Kaserzyk, a Polish computer programmer working at Sipa Press at the time, and forced him to reveal his PIN numbers. They also took his mobile phone and his laptop. Before leaving the scene, they looked around for the bullet that had gone through the victim’s foot and took it away with them.

It was alleged that the robbery had been carried out by the security services, that only material belonging to Andanson had been taken and that the French police never investigated the crime. Operation Paget found that computers, scanners and camera, worth 540,000 francs (around £54,000) were stolen, but nothing belonging to Andanson was missing. The French police arrested what they described as ordinary criminals who were linked to a series of similar robberies. They were arrested during another robbery and had previous convictions. One of them was carrying the mobile phone he had stolen during the Sipa raid and had the same gun. There was no evidence that the security services were involved or that Andanson worked for the SIS. Goskin Sipahioglu and his wife, who owned Sipa Press, said that the raid on their offices had nothing to do with the deaths of Diana or James Andanson. It was more likely that the criminals were looking for some compromising photographs of a particular French celebrity, although he did not name the person. Sipahioglu told Operation Paget that, at the time of the burglary, Sipa Press was in dispute with a television personality he named as “Arthur”. “Arthur” had been photographed in the company of a girl and had made threats towards Sipa Press in an attempt to stop the photographs being published.

There was yet another crime scene involved in the death of Diana. On 1 September 1997, the office in the London home of Lionel Cherrault, a French photographer based in Britain, was burgled. Cherrault also worked with Sipa in Paris and specialized in pictures of the royal family. Credit cards, cheque books, £50 and 400 French francs were taken, along with a computer whose hard-disk carried many of his photographs.

At 1 a.m. the previous morning, Cherrault had been woken by a call, from the owner of Sipa, who told him about the car crash. He considered going to Paris, but decided against it. A short while later he got a call from British photographer Mark Saunders, a colleague in Florida, who told him that a contact was offering pictures of the crash. He asked Cherrault if he was interested in getting copies. Cherrault told him that he was and Saunders said that he would get back to him in three or four hours. Cherrault and his wife Christine waited up, but Saunders did not call and Cherrault did not receive any photographs.

Detective Sergeant Freeman, the investigating officer, visited the scene and wrote in the crime report: “The VIW [victim or witness] has for the last sixteen years, been almost exclusively photographing the royal family and has in recent years concentrated his efforts on the Princess of Wales. The computer equipment contained a huge library of royal photographs and appears to have been the main target for the perpetrators. It appears too much of a coincidence that the burglary took place when it did to not be connected with her death. The property stolen indicates that the thief would have prior knowledge of the house or the VIW’s business in that an older Apple computer was left at the scene whereas the standard computer burglar tends to take all computers which are present.”

DS Freeman confirmed that he had said this.

“I consider that, on reflection, the comment was appropriate, given the facts as I saw them at the time the entry was made,” he explained later.