Princess Diana’s home may have been bugged, her inquest heard yesterday (07.01.08).
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Security expert Grahame Harding claims he searched Diana’s rooms in Kensington Palace four times in four months in 1994 – three years before she was killed in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997 – and on one occasion found a possible signal.
Harding said the suspected bugging device was discovered in a wall dividing Diana’s rooms from one used by her estranged husband Prince Charles. He told the court: “It could have been a number of things … at that time I believed it was a particular device.”
Harding explained to jury at the High Court there was no evidence the wall had been altered with and he couldn’t get access to the room behind the wall. When he went back a few days later the signal was gone and he admitted the readings could have come from a mobile phone or radio.
The inquest also heard of Diana’s fear she was being bugged by the “dark forces”.
Earlier, the jury were told Diana had ended her relationship with Dodi Fayed a few weeks before they were both killed in the fatal car crash. Rodney Turner, who became a personal friend of the princess after he started supplying her with BMW cars in 1995, said he spoke to Diana in August 1997 about her romance.
He said: “What she said to me was that it was all over, which was really a shock for me.”
He said the princess told him: “Don’t fuss, don’t fuss. It’s all over. I’ve had a wonderful time.”
Michael Mansfield QC, counsel for Dodi’s father Mohamed Al fayed, asked Turner whether the princess was simply trying to avoid talking about the relationship because she knew he did not approve of it.
He replied: “You could be absolutely right.”
But Turner added the princess had never told him “she was intending to get married to one particular person”.
Al Fayed has always insisted Diana and Dodi were murdered by the British establishment because they were about to announce their engagement and Diana was pregnant.
