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Waiter: Diana driver drunk before crash


Published: Dec. 21, 2007 at 5:03 PM
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LONDON, Dec. 21 (UPI) -- A waiter at the Ritz Hotel in Paris has told a British inquest that the man who drove Princess Diana to her death was too drunk to walk straight.

Alain Willaumez, testifying from France Thursday by video link, said Ritz Hotel managers told him to lie to Paris police about Henri Paul's drunkenness, saying that he had been drinking fruit juice, The Sun reported.

Princess Diana, Paul and Dodi Fayed, son of the owner of the Ritz and Harrods Department Store in London, were killed in the 1997 crash. Paul was head of security at the hotel.

"When he left the bar he bumped into one of my colleagues," Willaumez testified.

"It was not a precise and accurate walk. He was walking like a clown. He was staggering like a drunk."

Also Thursday, Richard Kay, a journalist who had become close to Diana, said that she had called him a few hours before her death and said she was thinking of moving out of Britain.

French investigators concluded that Paul was to blame for the crash, which occurred as he tried to elude photographers. But Mohammed al-Fayed, Dodi Fayed's father, contends that British agents set up the crash.

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