Kevin Connolly was a BBC correspondent and was in Paris when Princess Diana died after her serious car accident. Today he remembers the French police hiding the gravity of their injuries.
Kevin Connolly was in Paris as the BBC correspondent when Princess Diana’s driver got off the track in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel and the car overturned. The badly injured Diana was then taken to a Paris hospital, where she died. Today marks the 24th anniversary of her death. In the British newspaper “Express”, the journalist recalls the day when it was not only Paris that was in a state of emergency.
Princess Diana’s death anniversary: journalist remembers
Journalists from all over the world wanted to find out how the injured princess is doing. An attention that the French police were aware of. “People were extremely careful. The real realization that Diana had died came very slowly,” recalls Connolly. “We listened very carefully to the French authorities and tried to decipher what they were telling us,” he told the “Express”.
The police are said to have deliberately concealed how serious Diana’s injuries were, believes the former correspondent. “The initial statements from the police and the hospital were, ‘Yes, it’s the Princess of Wales, yes, she is injured’ but in the early hours of the morning there was no evidence that she might have been fatally injured. In retrospect, I did the feeling that the French authorities were appalled when they had to deal with this matter, “he says.
Unclear about news of death
To this day, it is not entirely clear how the news of death finally got to the public. According to various journalists, it was distributed by reporters who were on board Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s flight in the Philippines. However, Cook, who died in 2005, never confirmed this.
Connolly drove to the scene of the accident “to collect information, to find eyewitnesses, to find someone who can give a real impression of what happened,” he says. “The night went by in a flash, until the moment when the beeps sounded at the start of a special and you are suddenly the person who has to say that the Princess of Wales has died,” he recalls.
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