Posted Sunday, January 11, 2004; 15.48GMT
Al Fayed has never stopped believing. The Harrods boss has a thirst for vengeance against an establishment that has denied him British citizenship and refused to take him to its bosom. He seems convinced that the pinnacle of that establishment — the royal family — had his son killed because he was about to seize Diana, its crown jewel. So the billionaire has funded endless litigation and appeals, so helping delay the inquest for half a decade. Now he has hired one of the most expensive, able and left-wing lawyers in the country to make his case. Michael Mansfield specializes in defending victims of miscarriages of justice — such as the Birmingham Six, Irishmen wrongly convicted of being I.R.A. bombers. It is fair to assume that he will subsidize his pro bono work through his work for al Fayed. He certainly has a talent for getting up the nose of British officialdom.
Ranged against al-Fayed's team is ... nobody. Since this is not a trial, there are no plaintiffs or defendants. But as last Tuesday's events showed, there is an accused: Charles. That the Prince cannot defend himself against the charges in a courtroom — unless he sues for libel, which he has never done — must be especially galling for him. Reviled in the immediate aftermath of Diana's death, Charles was subsequently able to rehabilitate his image, proving a loving and attentive father to his sons, Princes William and Harry, and even winning popular approval for his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. But he has suffered a bad-press relapse in recent months. Amid allegations of lurid goings-on among the servants, he has had to deny unsubstantiated and far-fetched tales about his own sexual behavior, all contributing to an unsavory impression of life at his court. Now the Windsors can only watch and wince as the investigators begin their work and the conspiracy buffs clog the airwaves. Here are some of the wildest hypotheses:
Charles ordered it. Like al Fayed, many theorists believe British agents acted on the Prince's orders to kill the couple. Why would Charles want her bumped off? To prevent her marrying Dodi. Never mind that Diana hardly knew Dodi, having met him only six weeks before, or that she had, according to her close friends, no intention of marrying him.
Diana was pregnant. The story goes that she was carrying a child by Dodi — or possibly by her previous lover, the Pakistani-born surgeon Hasnat Khan. The Princess was said to be keen to have a "beautiful brown baby." Al Fayed and many in the Arab world have assumed that the Windsors could not bear the idea of an Islamic strain in the royal bloodline. ("Can you imagine his son Prince William, the would-be King of England, having a half-brother who is Muslim?" asks Manila cab driver Abdil Causal.) Never mind that she was no longer a member of the royal family following her divorce from Charles. The conspiracists claim that the formaldehyde injected by the French to preserve her body might have disguised any chemical evidence of her pregnancy. Last week the former royal coroner, John Burton, one of only two people present at Diana's postmortem examination, tried to quash the rumor once and for all. "She wasn't pregnant," he told a British paper. "I have seen into her womb." But he conceded that "when it's all over, 95% of the people will still disregard the facts and want to go back to their conspiracies."
The white Fiat did it. Conspiracists are divided over the assassins' modus operandi. Perhaps Henri Paul was blinded by flashlights pointed at his eyes by agents standing on the sidewalk — the Diana equivalent of the grassy knoll. A more popular theory is that the driver of a mysterious small white car veered into the Mercedes and deliberately caused it to crash. The French investigation into small scratches of white paint found on the side of the wreckage of the Mercedes established that they could only have come from a Fiat Uno car made between 1983 and 1987. Although one was spotted by a couple driving through the tunnel just before the accident, the car itself and its owner were never found. The police decided that, although the Mercedes might have touched a Fiat in a glancing blow, that was not what caused it to crash. In any event, how many secret services would use a 10-year-old jalopy as the murder weapon? Also, the couple had decided on their route only a few minutes before setting off from the Ritz Hotel. There was no way for anyone else to anticipate what direction they were taking, no time to finalize or carry out a plot.
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