Less than a half-hour before the fatal car crash that killed Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, Fayed’s father urged his son to spend the night at the Ritz Hotel rather than face the paparazzi waiting outside, Mohamed Al Fayed said.
“Twenty minutes later, I got a call from one of my security guys at the hotel,” Al Fayed told NBC’s Katie Couric in an interview scheduled to air Tuesday night on “Dateline NBC.” NBC released a partial transcript Monday.
Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul, a Ritz employee, were killed in the Aug. 31 crash in a Paris traffic tunnel, shortly after leaving the hotel. Paul was drunk at the time, and is believed to have been driving very fast.
Al Fayed said he believes there was a conspiracy to kill his son and Diana because people didn’t want to see an Egyptian stepfather for the future king.
He said he hasn’t been trying to exaggerate the intensity of their relationship to increase his own stature. “I don’t need any more stature,” said the owner of the Ritz Hotel in Paris and the British department store Harrods.
