Maybe she staged her own death and is living it up in a secret tropical hideaway. Maybe Henri Paul, the chauffeur on the fateful night, was an agent for MI6, Britain's equivalent of the CIA, hired by the royal family to kill her (and himself -- oops!) as their Mercedes sped through a Parisian underpass.
Or, as the exasperated columnist Simon Hoggart of The Guardian wrote on Thursday, maybe Diana, Princess of Wales, died on Aug. 31, 1997, because "Prince Charles, together with various gay courtiers, shot at the car from a stealth helicopter just as it entered the tunnel."
You could speculate endlessly about Diana's death -- and 27 percent of the British public, by one poll, believes that it was murder -- but until last week you would have been hard-pressed to find a responsible public figure willing to entertain any of the conspiracy theories.
That all changed Tuesday. In an odd turn of events, Michael Burgess, the man presiding over the British inquests into the deaths of Diana and the boyfriend who died with her, Emad Mohamed al-Fayed, mysteriously refused to dismiss the murder hypotheses.
"I am aware that there is speculation that these deaths were not the result of a sad, but relatively straightforward, road traffic accident in Paris," Burgess said, before directing the Metropolitan Police to look into the matter and report back.
Burgess was hardly announcing a Warren Commission for modern times, but his astonishing request heartened proponents of the murder theory, as well as throwing a small crumb of legitimacy, perhaps, to those who believe that the 1969 lunar landing took place on a Hollywood back lot and that Elvis lives (with Diana, maybe!) in a Florida trailer park.
As far as Diana goes, most nonaccident theories have been discredited. In 1999, the French authorities concluded that the accident took place because Paul, the driver, was drunk and speeding out of control. On Thursday, Jean-Claude Mules, a senior police officer in that investigation, told The Daily Telegraph that the continued rumors of murder and cover-up were "absurd" and that his team had already looked into the various "hypotheses, theories and allegations" swirling around the accident.
Yet the rumors persist, like niggling gnats. Some people might find them good conversation pieces, as ice-breaking as the English weather; others might be X-Files-style enthusiasts, seeing second gunmen lurking behind every shrub and plots behind every unexplained detail; and others, said Cary Cooper, a professor of psychology and health at Lancaster University, simply take emotional comfort from them.
"People need explanations," Cooper said in an interview. "Diana was attractive, young and a celebrity, and quite a lot of people can't understand it when a young person dies. They have to find some kind of theory, some kind of explanation behind it."
Cooper said that some people find that believing in all-powerful government agencies, even secret and ruthless ones, is more palatable than accepting that death is unpredictable.
"If things can just happen to you randomly, it means you are vulnerable," he said. "We'd rather think there was something behind it, because then we could, maybe, control it. If we can find someone who killed Kennedy, maybe we can find a way so that it doesn't happen again, not just to other Kennedys, but to other people."
Meanwhile, Fayed's father, Mohamed al-Fayed, who owns Harrods department store and has said he is "99 percent certain" that the crash was not an accident, has been fanning the flames of the theories with a variety of lawsuits seeking, for instance, to force various governments to release their files on the crash.
Outside Kensington Palace on Thursday, Mark Jamieson, a 46-year-old handyman from Australia visiting London with his two daughters, said the conspiracy theories sounded as good as any explanation to him.
"It was probably a tragic accident," Jamieson said.
Then he thought for a moment. "But if there was a conspiracy, I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe Charles hinted to somebody that she'd be better off dead, and someone took it literally.
"In fact, I'd like to think that Charles did it, because I don't like him at all," Jamieson said.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
RSS