Princess Diana’s driver was in regular contact with the French intelligence service, her inquest heard yesterday (05.12.07).
Popular on LondonNet
Claude Roulet claims Henri Paul, the deputy head of security at the Ritz Hotel Paris where Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed were staying, spoke regularly with police and the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) about information regarding “important guests”.
When asked if it was Paul’s job to liaise with police, Roulet – who was assistant to the president of the Ritz – told the jury at London’s High Court: “Usually it is the task of the security chief but Henri Paul had very good contacts with the French police so maybe those contacts meant he was contacted more than his chief.”
Paul was behind the wheel of Diana’s Mercedes when it crashed into pillar 13 of the Pont de l’Alma in the early hours of August 31, 1997, killing himself, the princess, and Dodi.
Roulet explained an incident when he was contacted by one of Paul’s contacts at the DST directly.
He said: “I was advised of the presence of a Russian diplomat and I called Mr Paul to say that this person would be here.
“He said, ‘I will call someone and I was contracted by someone from the DST and he wanted to speak to me to know the details of this person.”
Roulet told the court he understood the DST to be the French equivalent of the British Security Service MI5. Dodi’s father Mohamed al Fayed is convinced his son and the princess were murdered in a plot led by MI6 on the orders of Prince Philip, because they were about to announce their engagement and Diana was pregnant.
He believes Paul – who had the equivalent of £1,256 on his person at the scene of the crash – was in the pay of spies and acting on their orders on the night of 31 August, 1997.
