New DNA checks confirm Diana driver was drunk

Published on Sunday 10 December 2006 00:55

FRESH DNA tests prove the driver of the car in which Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed was drunk at the time of the crash.

The French authorities have carried out new checks on the blood taken from Henri Paul to prove his original samples could not have been switched, it will be revealed in a BBC documentary tonight.

Since the Princess's death in 1997, conspiracy theories have centred on claims that Paul's postmortem samples were swapped at the morgue to frame him as a drunk as part of a cover-up of a secret service plot to murder the royal.

There have also been suggestions his samples were inadvertently mixed up with another body. Paul was killed in the 1997 Paris crash alongside the Princess and her lover Dodi Fayed. A two-year investigation in France in 1999 concluded he caused the crash by driving too fast while drunk.

The BBC2 programme How Diana Died: The Conspiracy Files has discovered that further DNA tests have been carried out in France within the last year. A profile taken from Paul's blood samples was compared with his parents' DNA and found to match, meaning they could not have been switched, a source told the BBC.

The original tests showed Paul to be three times over the French drink-drive limit.

The revelation comes as Lord Stevens prepares to publish his long-awaited police investigation next week into Diana's death - nearly a decade after she died. He is expected to say the crash was a tragic accident.

How Diana Died: The Conspiracy Files will be broadcast on BBC2 tonight at 9pm.

Meanwhile, an opinion poll for The Conspiracy Files found that nearly a third of people (31%) believed Diana's death was not an accident. Just four out of 10 people (43%) agree with the French findings that it was an accident. More than a quarter said they did not know.

The survey quizzed 1,000 adults in the UK between October 27 and 29.

The Alma Tunnel crash investigation was the biggest in French history and was carried out by the country's top police force, the Criminal Brigade. After two years it concluded Diana's death was a tragic accident. Paul was held to blame for the crash and found to be drunk and driving at excessive speed.

However, conspiracy theories have gripped the public imagination as a result of doubts raised about the French police investigation. Sceptics of the official account question why a crucial witness, the driver of a second car involved in the crash, has never been identified and how it took nearly two hours to get Diana to a hospital just four miles away.

The royal biographer Nicholas Davies tells the programme: "The more we are left with so many unanswered questions, the more we are left saying there is only one answer to this - that she was taken out."

And former royal correspondent Noel Botham claimed the Princess sensed danger. Botham said: "Diana was fearful of her own death for the last few years of her life. Right up to the moment of the accident she believed somebody was out there to get her, and she was right."