Lawyers Line Up for Start of Diana Hearing

PRELIMINARY hearings for the inquest into Diana, Princess of Wales’s death get under way today.The next stage in the longawaited case comes nearly a decade after Diana and lover Dodi Fayed were killed in a Paris car crash and three years after the inquests were first opened.Britain’s former top female judge Baroness Butler- Sloss has come out of retirement to preside over the inquest.She has called the initial hearings today and tomorrow at the High Court in London to hear legal argument.She will assess whether there is any need for a jury and discuss whether separate or joint inquests will be held.Dodi’s father, Harrods boss Mohamed al Fayed, is to call for a jury to be made up of members of the public.But as the body of Diana – who was still part of the Royal Family when she died – lay in the chapel at St James’s Palace before her funeral, any jury would have to be made up of members of the Royal Household.Lady Butler-Sloss is also likely to set out a timetable for the inquests.The hearings are finally able to go ahead following the publication of Lord Stevens’s Metropolitan Police inquiry last month. The multi-million pound investigation, which took three years to complete, dismissed the many conspiracy theories surrounding the fatal incident in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in the early hours of August 31, 1997. It concluded the crash was an accident, and that driver Henri Paul was drunk.Mr Al Fayed maintains the couple was murdered as part of a secret plot by the British establishment. He has branded Lord Stevens’s investigation “garbage”. Mr Al Fayed’s legal team will make representations, arguing for joint inquests and a jury made of 11 ordinary people.

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