The United States television network CBS broadcast on Wednesday grainy, never-before seen photographs of a dying Princess Diana in the minutes following the 1997 car crash in Paris that killed her and her lover Dodi Al Fayed.
The photocopied, indistinct, black and white images were taken from a copy of the confidential French investigation into the accident, which the network said it had managed to obtain.
One fuzzy image showed the princess’s seemingly blood-stained head, as she was being treated in the wreckage of the car by a French doctor, Frederick Maillez, who had arrived on the scene minutes after the crash occurred in a Parisian underpass.
In a statement, CBS defended its broadcast in a special edition of it’s evening ”48 Hours” news magazine program, saying none of the photocopied pictures were ”remotely graphic”.
The remainder of the program was largely a rehash of the various conspiracy theories surrounding Diana’s death.
It uncovered no new evidence to contradict the conclusion of the French report that the crash was caused by excessive speed and the high levels of alcohol and prescription drugs found in the blood of the driver Henri Paul.
In Britain, Dodi Al Fayed’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, who has long claimed that the crash was engineered by the British security services, condemned the US network for showing the photographs.
”CBS obviously doesn’t care about the appalling effect of showing images of murder victims. They simply want to cash in on the tragedy,” he was quoted as saying by the BBC.
The crash came one year after Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles, the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II and the heir to the British throne. – Sapa-AFP