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August 31, 1997
Prince Charles Arrives in Paris to Take Diana's Body Home
By CRAIG R. WHITNEY
ARIS -- Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, flew to Paris Sunday evening and sadly accepted the plain wooden coffin with the remains of Diana, Princess of Wales, who was killed after midnight this morning in a high-speed automobile crash as she and Emad Mohammed al-Fayed were fleeing photographers pursuing them with motorcycles. [Prince Charles's plane arrived at RAF Northolt airbase near London around 7 p.m. (2 p.m. Eastern time) where he was met by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Diana's remains were taken to a private mortuary, CNN reported.]
Prince Charles and Diana were divorced a year ago. The Prince, who arrived with their sons, Prince William, 15, and Prince Harry, 12, and Diana's two sisters, escorted the coffin back to Britain where it landed late Sunday.
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The Death of Princess Diana OTHER PLACES OF INTEREST ON THE WEB
The British Monarchy The Press Association NewsCentre ITN Online Teletext [Charles arrived at the hospital where Diana's body lay at 5:40 p.m. (11:40 a.m. Eastern time), along with the princess's two grief-stricken sisters. He was met by President Jacques Chirac and his wife, Bernadette. A half-hour later, Diana's coffin, draped in the multicolored Royal Standard, the personal flag of the royal family, was placed in a hearse, and the prince's motorcade drove to an airfield near Paris, where they took off for Britain.]
President Jacques Chirac and other French officials expressed the sympathy of the entire French nation.
Al-Fayed, 41, known familiarly as Dodi, had been linked romantically with Diana for several months. He died instantly when the powerful Mercedes 600 sedan they were riding from the Ritz Hotel, where they had had dinner, to an apartment in the fashionable 16th Arrondissement, was reduced to twisted metal in the crash at 12:35 a.m.
Meanwhile, French police opened a criminal investigation Sunday to determine whether seven freelance photographers, who used motorcycles to chase the car carrying Diana and al-Fayed, were responsible for their deaths.
The driver, an employee of the hotel, which is owned by al-Fayed's father, Mohamed, the Egyptian-born owner of Harrods, was also killed and a bodyguard was seriously injured.
Witnesses said police who arrived on the scene of the accident pummeled several of the photographers before taking them into custody.
Police did not identify the photographers except by their nationalities, six French and one Macedonian, and placed them in formal detention, authorities said, after questioning so that judicial authorities and criminal detectives could determine whether their motorcycle pursuit of the Mercedes had contributed to causing the accident.
French, other European officials and President Clinton expressed condolences to the British people for the Princess's death, and some, like Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, blamed unscrupulous media.
Police estimated that the car had been going well over 100 kilometers per hour when it apparently hit one of the central pillars in the tunnel's dividing lane and then ricocheted across to the concrete wall, with the photographers on their motorcycles and scooters some distance behind.
Ambulance workers took some time to extricate the princess's body from the wreckage and rushed her to the Piti-Salptrire university hospital, where she died at about 4 a.m. Paris time (10 p.m. Saturday, EST) of cardiac arrest following massive internal bleeding from wounds to heart arteries .
Her death was announced two hours later by the French Interior Minister, Jean-Pierre Chvnement, with Dr. Bruno Riou and a team of surgeons at his side.
"On her arrival at the Salptrire Hospital, she appeared to be in serious hemorrhagic shock, originating in her thorax, and soon afterwards, she had a cardiac arrest," Dr. Riou said. "Her chest cavity was urgently opened up, revealing a significant wound to her left ventricle. Despite a closure of the wound and an external and internal cardiac massage lasting two hours, no effective circulation could be re-established, and death was noted at 4 a.m."
Hundreds of tourists and Parisians flocked to the accident scene, a divided-highway tunnel under the Place de l'Alma on the right bank of the Seine midway between the Ritz and Mr. al-Fayed's apartment, to look at the site. Many deposited flowers, as hundreds more did at the hospital, where crowds gathered across the street in anticipation of Prince Charles's arrival by helicopter from Villacoublay Air Base.
The Princess, 36, had vacationed with al-Fayed, 41, on the French Riviera earlier this month and had been expected to return to London today to be with her two sons, the Princes William and Harry. Instead they were in Paris with their father to take her coffin home.
French radio stations reported that a spokesman for the British royal family in London expressed anger and said the accident was predictable because photographers relentlessly pursued the Princess wherever she went.
The Paris police said that the Interior Minister, Chvnement, and the Prefect of Police, Philippe Massoni, had accompanied the British Ambassador in Paris to the hospital where the Princess was treated.
The police said the car was totally wrecked. The impact was so great, the car's radiator was hurled onto the knees of the front-seat passenger. The Princess was in the back seat.
The site of the accident, in the Eighth Arrondissement, is on a high-speed road along the Seine with a divided roadway that passes under the Place de l'Alma to the Place de la Concorde.
On Aug. 21, Diana and al-Fayed flew to the French Mediterranean resort of St. Tropez for their third holiday in each other's company in five weeks.
Al-Fayed's father said in an interview with The New York Times in London last week that the two were simply "young people getting to know each other."
British newspapers reported that Diana first met al-Fayed almost 10 years ago when he and Prince Charles played polo on opposing teams. He had produced or co-produced films that included the 1981 Oscar-winning "Chariots of Fire," "The World According to Garp," "F/X" and "Hook."
Reportedly a multimillionaire, al-Fayed had homes in London, New York, Los Angeles and Switzerland and a garage full of luxury cars. He was divorced after a marriage that lasted eight months in 1994.
Diana was catapulted into the public eye at age 19 in 1981 when it was announced that she was engaged to Charles, the heir to the British throne and 12 years her senior.
The couple was married on July 29 that year in London in a ceremony watched by millions and billed as a "fairy-tale wedding."
Diana soon became a mother, to Prince William in June 1982, but by the birth of her second son, Harry, in September 1984, her biographer Andrew Morton wrote in "Diana: Her True Story," she was already suffering from bulimia and had attempted suicide five times.
From 1986, the first press stories began appearing of cracks in the marriage, and Morton later wrote that Charles had resumed his relationship with a married friend, Camilla Parker Bowles, at that time.
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