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In the early hours of Sunday August 31st 1997, in the centre of Paris, a tragedy that shocked
the world by the nature of the events themselves but also because what happened was so unexpected,
so out of context with what had gone before. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales on that
fateful summer night has been talked about, analysed, questioned ever since. The facts
themselves are fairly straightforward; Diana had recently begun a romance with Dodi Al-Fayed.
Press photographers desperate to get pictures of the couple were following them everywhere.
That night they'd arrived at the Ritz Hotel, owned by Dodi's father, Mohamed, hoping to
get some privacy. They were pictured on security cameras as they made arrangements to have
dinner in the Hotel that done the next problem was how to get out of the Hotel without being
hounded by the Press. They planned for decoy cars to leave the front of the Hotel while
they slipped out of the back. Their driver was to be Henri Paul, a trusted member of
the Hotel's security staff, not the usual chauffeur. The car left the Ritz with Diana
and Dodi in the back and a bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones and driver Henri Paul in the front.
Their plan to escape the photographers did not work, they were spotted and followed.
At half past midnight, the Princess's car was just entering an underpass on a road alongside
the River Seine, it brushed a central support pillar, spun around and collided with the
tunnel wall. Rescuers were on the scene within minutes. Diana had suffered severe head and
chest injuries but she was still alive when the first rescuers arrived. Dodi Al-Fayed
and Henri Paul died instantly. Trevor Rees Jones was seriously injured. Doctors had tried
to treat Diana at the scene, but she never regained consciousness and died at four o'clock
in the morning in a nearby hospital. Blame for the accident was bitterly contested. True,
the driver, Henri Paul, had been drinking. True, the photographers were in hot pursuit
of the car. But as the scene of the crash became a shrine to the Princess, months of
enquiry into the tragedy failed to provide a truly definitive answer. Public grief was
profound at the loss of a brief life that was extinguished so brutally.