BRITAIN:Royal family hope the findings will quash lingering conspiracies surrounding the cause of the 1997 car crash, writes Jimmy Burns
The death of Diana, princess of Wales, was a tragic accident, not a plot orchestrated by British intelligence, as alleged by conspiracy theorists, a report by Britain's former top police officer is expected to confirm today.
The princess and her friend Dodi Fayed were killed along with a French driver when their car crashed at high speed in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris on August 31st, 1997.
The news provoked an outpouring of grief and stirred widespread criticism of the British royal family, accused of being out of touch with the people.
Nine years after the princess's death, the royal family's reputation has recovered. The queen is the British public figure with the most enduringly high popularity ratings - 85 per cent in one national newspaper opinion poll.
Diana's former husband, Prince Charles, together with their sons Princes William and Harry, are hoping that today's report by Lord Stevens will go a long way to quashing the lingering doubts surrounding the crash.
This week the younger princes unveiled plans for a charity concert followed by a memorial service to mark the 10th anniversary next year of their mother's death.
Today Lord Stevens is expected to confirm the broad findings of an official French inquiry which concluded in 1999 that Henri Paul, who was driving Diana on the night of the crash, lost control of the car while under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs.
The Stevens investigation is thought to have found some additional evidence that Paul, an employee at the Ritz hotel where Diana and Dodi Fayed were staying, had also been doing some work as an informant for the French security services, but that this had no bearing on the way he drove that night.
In February this year a Paris court fined three photographers who took pictures of Diana as she lay dying in the wrecked Mercedes, after finding them liable for invasion of privacy. However, all nine paparazzi following Diana on the night have denied their pursuit caused the crash and were cleared by a separate French court of manslaughter.
Lord Stevens, a former Scotland Yard chief, was asked by a British coroner in January 2004 to conduct the inquiry after an inquest into Diana's death was opened and adjourned amid continuing speculation that she was the victim of an assassination plot.
Mohamed al-Fayed, the owner of Harrods department store, has claimed that Diana was pregnant with his son Dodi's baby, and was killed by British intelligence as part of a conspiracy to put an end to her worsening relationship with the royal family - and any possibility of a foreign Muslim further entering British establishment circles.
While no medical evidence has emerged that Diana was pregnant, the assassination theory developed amid claims, never substantiated by any key witnesses, that the Mercedes had collided with a car and crashed after Paul had been distracted by a blinding flash.
Variations on this conspiracy have become the subject of books, TV documentaries and numerous website postings. They were fuelled by a statement by Richard Tomlinson, a former MI6 agent, who claimed British intelligence had drafted a plan to assassinate the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic by causing his car to crash in a tunnel using a flash gun.
MI6, the British secret intelligence service whose representatives are thought to be among dozens of officials and witnesses interviewed by the Stevens investigation team, has strongly denied that such a plan was implemented, or that any of its officers or agents were in any way responsible for Diana's death.
Nevertheless, Lord Stevens is likely to argue that his £2 million-plus (€2.98 million), three-year investigation was worth it for trying to set the record straight, even if the more obsessive conspiracy theorists are unlikely to be convinced.