Fayed’s security chief admits lying
The Harrods tycoon listened quietly as layers of his theory that Diana was murdered in a 1997 car crash by MI6 on the order of the Duke of Edinburgh because she was pregnant and set to get engaged to his son Dodi were stripped down.
John Macnamara, a retired Metropolitan Police detective chief superintendent and Mr al Fayed’s director of security in August 1997, accepted he had lied in public when he claimed in a television interview that driver Henri Paul had only drunk pineapple juice.
The jury also heard Lord Stevens, who carried out Operation Paget, the official investigation into the conspiracy theories, publicly denounce for the first time “scurrilous allegations” about his professionalism.
He condemned suggestions that he or his team had been negligent or had not done their job properly, and he called the allegations “quite outrageous”.
Lord Stevens’s report, published in December 2006, found the deaths were a tragic accident and also that Mr Paul was three times over the French drink-drive limit.
The hearing was adjourned to Monday when Mr al Fayed is set to give evidence.
