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Journalism of Courage
November 7: French police unions on Thursday attacked as “verging on the indecent” the scale and cost of the investigation into the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, on August 31. A decision earlier this week to deploy 24 members of the Paris CID — a quarter of the unit’s entire strength — to tracing the owner of a white Fiat Uno that may have collided with the Mercedes in which the Princess was travelling was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Jean-Louis Arajol, general secretary of the SGP-CUP union.
“The criminal brigade already have a lot of work on their hands, and they do not need this,” he said. “It is impossible to accept one citizen receiving preferential treatment from the law, even if it is a princess. Road accidents happen every day, and we never deploy resources on this scale.”
Gerard Boyer of the Alliance police union branded the latest mobilisation of police resources all but indecent. “It seems the powers that be are glorying in the scale of the investigation,” he said. “When you compare the resources being poured into this investigation with those devoted to tracking down criminals, it’s dizzying.”
The two investigating magistrates decided on Monday to call in, one-by-one, the owners of 40,000 white Fiat Unos registered in the Paris area between 1983 and 1986 to their local police stations for questioning. The Paris CID will co-ordinate the operation over the next few weeks. If they fail to find the right car, the search will extend to the rest of France, and may eventually include three other Fiat models that could have left the traces of white paint found on the Mercedes.
The official inquiry into the crash, which also killed Dodi Al Fayed and the car’s driver, Henri Paul, has become one of the largest and most expensive police investigations in France in the last 10 years. For most of the last eight weeks, up to 90 police officers have been involved, as well as two investigating magistrates and their staff. The cost of technical tests alone — on the paint traces and the Mercedes — is put at over — 250,000.“I have never seen so many means put in place for a car accident — it’s absurd,” said Jean-Claude Bouvier, secretary general of the magistrates’ union. “If such vast means are deployed for one person, they should be for everyone. I don’t care if it is for royalty or not.”
William Bourdon, a lawyer for one of the photographers under investigation, said: “This inquiry goes beyond the norms of French judicial history. The responsibility rests on those who chose to make it such an exceptional case from the beginning. At the end of the day this was an accident, albeit an exceptional one, but still an accident.”
The inquiry has followed many leads, including witnesses’ statements that a car may have swerved in front of the Mercedes, causing it to crash in the Paris underpass.
But investigators are now thought to favour the hypothesis that high speed driving and Paul’s blood alcohol level were the prime causes.
