(Originally published by the Daily News on September 2, 1997. This was written by Bill Bell, Ellen Tumposky and Helen Kennedy.)
The man who drove Princess Diana and her lover into the wall of a Paris tunnel was a former French military pilot who was too drunk to see straight and may have been going as fast as 120 mph, authorities said yesterday.
He also allegedly taunted pursuing photographers, vowing “you won’t catch us.”
Henri Paul, 41, deputy security chief at the Ritz Hotel, had been off-duty but was ordered into work at the last minute to drive the glittering couple.
He did not have a chauffeur’s license but had been trained to drive a heavily armored Mercedes in anti-terrorist maneuvers.
Prosecutors said blood tests showed he had the equivalent of 10 glasses of wine or nine hefty shots of whiskey in his system three times the French blood-alcohol limit and more than twice the New York limit.
Officials said that much booze would leave a 165-pound man seeing double and unable to walk without staggering.
Prosecutors said that when investigators pried open the totaled Mercedes after Saturday’s crash and looked at the crumpled dashboard, they found the speedometer frozen at 196 kilometers per hour or 121 mph.
Paul died instantly in the high-speed crash, along with Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed.
Diana and Dodi ate their last dinner at the Ritz, which is owned by Al-Fayed’s father, billionaire Mohammed Al-Fayed.
For the father, the revelation that one of his employes may have been at fault in his son’s death was almost too much to bear.
“It’s cruelty upon cruelty,” said Michael Cole, his spokesman.
While they were eating, the couple sent out Diana’s driver in her Range Rover to lead waiting photographers on a wild goose chase, hotel workers said. Later, Al-Fayed’s driver was sent out in his Mercedes on a second decoy mission.
That left the lovebirds without transport, so they asked the Ritz security chief to find them a car and driver.
They got Paul and the hotel’s 2-ton, $170,000 armored 1994 Mercedes, which is used to chauffeur nervous VIPs, hotel workers said. Mercedes-Benz, however, said the car was a regular model.
Paul, a bachelor who had worked at the hotel since 1986, was an “exemplary employe,” Cole said. “There has never been a problem with his behavior.”
He had taken two anti-terrorist driving courses at Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart, Germany. Other chauffeurs at the hotel said he was reserved and chain-smoked small cigars.
As the car entered the tunnel near the Seine River, it was traveling at nearly 100 mph, witnesses said.
At the tunnel entrance, the speed limit is 50 mph, but inside there is a sharp left turn where the speed limit drops to 30 mph.
The car, pursued by paparazzi on motorcycles, failed to negotiate the turn. Le Monde, a Paris daily, reported the Mercedes swerved to avoid another car traveling at the legal speed limit.
The crash’s only survivor, Al-Fayed’s bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, was the only one in the car wearing a seat belt.
Al-Fayed lawyer Bernard Dartevelle said that yesterday’s developments don’t take the heat off the shutterbugs who were chasing the car.
Paul wouldn’t have been speeding if he weren’t trying to outrun the cameras, Darteville said, adding that Dodi’s father still intends to prosecute the lensmen.
Gilbert Collard, a lawyer for one of the seven detained paparazzi, said his client, Christian Martinez, told him the photographers were far behind the Mercedes.
Just before roaring off from the hotel, the driver crowed to photographers, “Don’t bother following, you won’t catch us,” Collard said.
The London Times reported that Ritz staffers said Paul was visibly drunk. The Financial Times reported today that Paul was known by photographers as both a tippler and a tipster.
Charges were expected to be brought against four of seven photographers for failing to help the victims. Instead, they snapped pictures as Diana moaned, according to the first doctor at the scene.
