I found an articles while looking through the Time Magazine website. It's pretty long:
Haunting Diana
A British coroner asks police to investigate the death of the Princess of Wales, reviving all those wild conspiracy theories. Will they ever let her rest in peace? Never, says royals reporter STEPHEN BATES, even as he debunks the myths
For a man attending the inquests into the death of his beloved son and his son's girlfriend, Mohammed al Fayed was anything but mournful. Accompanied by a phalanx of lawyers and p.r. flacks, the Egyptian-born billionaire emerged last Tuesday morning from an inquest session in London with an unmistakable air of triumph. And no wonder: the coroner, Michael Burgess, had just announced that he had asked Scotland Yard to help investigate the August 1997 deaths of Dodi Fayed and Diana, Princess of Wales. After identical proceedings in Reigate, 30 km south of London, al Fayed Senior — who owns the iconic London store Harrods and Fulham Football Club but has long felt shut out by the British establishment — gave the media pack his personal, oft-repeated verdict. "I suspect not only Prince Charles but Prince Philip, who is a racist," he announced. "It is absolutely black-and-white, horrendous murder." With that, the tycoon eased into a dark red Mercedes, looking altogether self-satisfied.
Nearly six-and-a-half years after that fatal car crash in a Paris tunnel, al Fayed finally had an entire nation (and a sizable chunk of the world) paying attention to his claim that Diana and Dodi had been murdered by British agents. Until now, it was mostly Diana worshipers and some paranoid Arab commentators who bought the conspiracy story; after all, al Fayed had provided not a jot of proof for his claim. But by calling in the police, Burgess had — wittingly or not — fired the imaginations of people around the world who suspect royal skulduggery. ("They have to investigate," says Sayed Ragab, a Cairo bookstore worker, "because there was surely foul play.") And if more fuel were needed, the U.K.'s Daily Mirror had supplied it that very morning: the tabloid revealed that in a letter written to her butler, Paul Burrell, 10 months before her death, Diana expressed the fear that she might be murdered in a car crash arranged by her ex-husband Charles, heir to the British throne.
And al Fayed's claim got another boost at week's end: the London Times reported that French investigators into the crash failed to conduct dna tests to confirm that a crucial blood sample, showing Diana's driver Henri Paul was drunk at the time of the crash, did indeed belong to Paul. The billionaire would no doubt take special pleasure in other reports that Charles and British intelligence agencies will face police questioning.
Coroners are sober folks, representatives of one of the oldest and most independent arms of the arcane English judicial system. They usually work in dusty rooms at the back of courthouses, establishing the cause of unexpected deaths. Few ever find themselves in the glare of the world's TV cameras. But Burgess might as well get used to it. A gray-haired, bespectacled lawyer, he is a pivotal figure in the latest chapter of the Diana saga. Not only is he Britain's royal coroner, in which capacity he is looking into Diana's death, but he is also coroner for the county of Surrey, where Dodi is buried, and is thus responsible for finding out his cause of death as well. (The conspiracy theorists may decide that this can't be mere coincidence.) The two inquests were opened separately Tuesday, but may eventually be held jointly since the two people died in the same crash.
As the reporters track Burgess's progress, they will inevitably find themselves jostling for space with a hardy band of Diana devotees — webmasters and hobbyists who incubate and nurture all manner of stories about the "truth" behind her death. Burgess must know that no matter what he finally concludes, they will never believe anything but that she was murdered. After all, they remain unmoved by the French investigation, carried out over two years by 30 detectives, who interviewed 300 witnesses to produce a 6,000-page report. The verdict: it was an accident. Diana and Dodi were being driven too fast, into a tunnel with a curve and a difficult road camber, by a chauffeur, Paul, who was not used to driving the powerful Mercedes S-280 and who was incapacitated by alcohol and prescription drugs. Paul, the investigators concluded, lost control of the vehicle and three of the four people in the car died. The survivor, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, was the only one who had bothered to buckle up his seatbelt.
The sudden or violent death of any public icon is invariably attended by fanciful, often crackpot conjecture. That Diana, in death, should go the way of John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe and Martin Luther King Jr. was presaged by the worldwide spasm of grief in the week following the crash. The speculation began almost immediately: a website called the First Diana Conspiracy Site was up and running within 13 minutes of news of her death. Fingers were pointed at the Freemasons, the British government, the Vatican, the I.R.A., even the global-arms industry. One instant theory was that a paparazzo who had been chasing the Mercedes was actually in the employ of Britain's MI6, and had shot out the tires. Another suggested the lovers were alive and had been spirited away in a van.
The rumors took hold quickest in the Arab world. Within hours of the crash, Egyptian writer Mohammad Hassanein Haykal wrote for the mena news agency:
They have to investigate, because there was surely foul play
— SAYED RAGAB, Cairo bookstore worker
"A conspiracy-type question arises here was something arranged to kill the two most famous lovers of the closing years of the 20th century?" A day or two later, Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi weighed in during an official broadcast: "British and French secret services mounted and executed the assassination of the Princess of Wales and the Arab citizen who were planning to get married." Gaddafi didn't explain how he had come by this information, but a poll a couple of days later showed that 47% of Palestinians believed the crash had been arranged. Soon paperbacks with titles like Did Diana Die a Muslim? were on sale in Cairo. Another — Who Killed Diana? Order From the Palace — said she was killed because she "threatened to bring down the Crown."
Mohammed al Fayed waited several months before making his allegation to the Daily Mirror on Feb. 12, 1998. He was, he said, "99.9% certain it was no accident. That car did not accidentally crash. There was a conspiracy." That August he offered a reward of up to $20 million to anyone who could prove it. A year after the crash, a poll found that nearly a quarter of Britons believed there had been a conspiracy — a figure that has held to this day (a recent Sunday Express poll found 27% believed it, while a highly unscientific call-in poll netted a whopping 85%).
Al Fayed has never stopped believing. The Harrods boss has a thirst for vengeance against an establishment that has denied him British citizenship and refused to take him to its bosom. He seems convinced that the pinnacle of that establishment — the royal family — had his son killed because he was about to seize Diana, its crown jewel. So the billionaire has funded endless litigation and appeals, so helping delay the inquest for half a decade. Now he has hired one of the most expensive, able and left-wing lawyers in the country to make his case. Michael Mansfield specializes in defending victims of miscarriages of justice — such as the Birmingham Six, Irishmen wrongly convicted of being I.R.A. bombers. It is fair to assume that he will subsidize his pro bono work through his work for al Fayed. He certainly has a talent for getting up the nose of British officialdom.
Ranged against al-Fayed's team is ... nobody. Since this is not a trial, there are no plaintiffs or defendants. But as last Tuesday's events showed, there is an accused: Charles. That the Prince cannot defend himself against the charges in a courtroom — unless he sues for libel, which he has never done — must be especially galling for him. Reviled in the immediate aftermath of Diana's death, Charles was subsequently able to rehabilitate his image, proving a loving and attentive father to his sons, Princes William and Harry, and even winning popular approval for his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles. But he has suffered a bad-press relapse in recent months. Amid allegations of lurid goings-on among the servants, he has had to deny unsubstantiated and far-fetched tales about his own sexual behavior, all contributing to an unsavory impression of life at his court. Now the Windsors can only watch and wince as the investigators begin their work and the conspiracy buffs clog the airwaves. Here are some of the wildest hypotheses:
Charles ordered it. Like al Fayed, many theorists believe British agents acted on the Prince's orders to kill the couple. Why would Charles want her bumped off? To prevent her marrying Dodi. Never mind that Diana hardly knew Dodi, having met him only six weeks before, or that she had, according to her close friends, no intention of marrying him.
Diana was pregnant. The story goes that she was carrying a child by Dodi — or possibly by her previous lover, the Pakistani-born surgeon Hasnat Khan. The Princess was said to be keen to have a "beautiful brown baby." Al Fayed and many in the Arab world have assumed that the Windsors could not bear the idea of an Islamic strain in the royal bloodline. ("Can you imagine his son Prince William, the would-be King of England, having a half-brother who is Muslim?" asks Manila cab driver Abdil Causal.) Never mind that she was no longer a member of the royal family following her divorce from Charles. The conspiracists claim that the formaldehyde injected by the French to preserve her body might have disguised any chemical evidence of her pregnancy. Last week the former royal coroner, John Burton, one of only two people present at Diana's postmortem examination, tried to quash the rumor once and for all. "She wasn't pregnant," he told a British paper. "I have seen into her womb." But he conceded that "when it's all over, 95% of the people will still disregard the facts and want to go back to their conspiracies."
The white Fiat did it. Conspiracists are divided over the assassins' modus operandi. Perhaps Henri Paul was blinded by flashlights pointed at his eyes by agents standing on the sidewalk — the Diana equivalent of the grassy knoll. A more popular theory is that the driver of a mysterious small white car veered into the Mercedes and deliberately caused it to crash. The French investigation into small scratches of white paint found on the side of the wreckage of the Mercedes established that they could only have come from a Fiat Uno car made between 1983 and 1987. Although one was spotted by a couple driving through the tunnel just before the accident, the car itself and its owner were never found. The police decided that, although the Mercedes might have touched a Fiat in a glancing blow, that was not what caused it to crash. In any event, how many secret services would use a 10-year-old jalopy as the murder weapon? Also, the couple had decided on their route only a few minutes before setting off from the Ritz Hotel. There was no way for anyone else to anticipate what direction they were taking, no time to finalize or carry out a plot.
The paparazzi did it. Since the Mercedes was being followed by several photographers on motor scooters, some have surmised that one or more tried to get too close to Diana's car — and sent it careening out of control. The trouble is, Henri Paul had left the pursuing photographers far behind by driving at 160 km/h. The French investigators castigated the paparazzi, even arrested some for a time, but ultimately decided they did not cause the crash.
Most objective analysts finger Paul for the crash, pointing out that he was in no condition to drive when Fayed Senior ordered him to do so. But the conspiracists will pounce on last week's report about the lack of DNA tests. Already, there have been allegations that the French postmortem tests showed Paul's blood had a very high level of carbon monoxide. But this appears to have been achieved by conspiracists adding the results of two different samples of his blood — one from his heart, the other from his groin — instead of taking an average between the two readings. Closer examination of the blood test shows that taking account of the fact that he had been smoking all evening, the carbon monoxide level was not abnormally high.
In short, none of the theories stacks up. Why, then, do they survive — and keep on getting new twists? One reason is that the original conspiracy theorist was Diana herself. She claimed someone had tried to take a "potshot" at her in London's Hyde Park, and darkly warned during the time of her divorce that she would one day be killed on Charles' orders in a helicopter crash. And last year, her former butler Burrell revealed the contents of her letter speculating that Charles would have her killed in a car accident. The Prince's name was blacked out, apparently for legal reasons, in Burrell's book, but the Daily Mirror revealed it last week. Diana's distraught letter didn't say why Charles would want to kill the mother of his two young sons — or think he could get away with it.
It's not hard to convince some of Charles' subjects that he was dastardly in his treatment of Diana. As the British know from long experience, the Windsor family is as secretive as it is dysfunctional. So many stories about them — brazen adultery, stingy treatment of servants — have proved to be true. In 1936, the then placid London papers were the last to report that King Edward VIII was planning to abdicate for his American mistress Wallis Simpson. They have never been so tardy or respectful since, ignoring no sliver of a rumor, however sleazy and unlikely, lest it be true. They supply their readers with a steady diet of soap-opera tales, the information coming mainly from royal staff eager to cash in. And by golly it's interesting stuff: Charles throws plates when angry, the Queen cares more for her pet corgis than people.
Diana may not have understood how to cope with the royal family, but she knew her soap operas and she knew her media. She would have enjoyed the fact that she can still give her former husband hell, and that she remains a global icon, the beautiful princess who triumphed over the ghastly family and eventually slipped the surly bonds of earth.
So now the royals have yet another problem. Michael Burgess's decision to hand the conspiracy theories over to the police means that the straightforward explanation for the accident can never win. Even if the theories are fully discounted and dispatched, that will only be seen as incontrovertible proof of a cover-up.
