MI6 plan 'to kill Balkan leader'

The admission from an unnamed agent emerged in the unlikely setting of the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

During evidence from disaffected former spy Richard Tomlinson, counsel to the inquest Nicholas Hilliard revealed that the officer, named only as "A", had confirmed he drew up the assassination plan for MI6 around 1993.

Mr Hilliard said A described the document as a "contingency plan" to kill the man in question should he come to power.

But he added that the agent had been told by his superiors that it was out of the question.

Mr Tomlinson was called as a witness to the Diana inquest after he told a French magistrate that the crash in Paris on 31 August, 1997 in which the princess died bore an "eerie similarity" to a plan he had seen when he worked for the organisation in the 1990s.

He claimed he had been shown a document around 1992 which detailed three options for killing Slobodan Milosevic.

Mr Tomlinson claimed in his book The Big Breach – published after his dismissal from the service – that the options outlined included staging a crash in a tunnel involving a blinding flash of light from a strobe gun while Mr Milosevic was at a peace conference in Geneva, the court heard.

But the jury was told that in an earlier draft of the book he had spoken instead of a drive-by ambush.

The court heard that Mr Tomlinson, who was recruited by MI6 in 1991 after studying at Cambridge, told a Scotland Yard team investigating the princess's death: "MI6 do have a capacity to stage accidents whether by helicopter, aeroplane or car, and also the strobe light that was shown to us by the SBS at Poole during our training."

He admitted during his evidence yesterday that he could have become confused about the details of what was in the document, but said such specifics were a "distraction" from the central issue of whether MI6 was ever involved in assassination attempts in principle.

The inquest continues.