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UK station ignores plea, shows Diana crash scene

A British television channel screened images on Wednesday taken immediately after the car crash that killed Princess Diana, defying a plea from her sons.

Diana's sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, had protested that showing photographs of the final moments of her life would be a "gross disrespect to their mother's memory."

Channel 4's documentary, Diana: The Witness in the Tunnel, showed photos of the scene inside the Mercedes carrying the princess after it crashed in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997, killing her friend Dodi Fayed.

But a detailed black and white image of the rear of the car, where Diana lay, showing a doctor attending to her minutes after the incident, did not show her face -- which was obscured by a gray square.

"If it were your or my mother dying in that tunnel, would we want the scene broadcast to the nation?" the princes' private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, said in a letter to Channel 4 television which was publicly released on Tuesday.

Channel 4 defended the film as a responsible documentary.

"We do not show, nor have we ever considered showing, Diana's final moments," the station said in a statement.

The broadcaster said the documentary examined the role of photographers alleged to have pursued Diana and boyfriend Dodi Fayed from the Ritz Hotel to the Pont d'Alma tunnel, where the couple's speeding limousine slammed into a concrete pillar.

Police inquiries in both France and Britain have already concluded that pursuing media did not cause the crash, or fail to act properly at the scene.

"They were very, very close," Mark Butt, an eyewitness, told the documentary. "But they did not impede anybody."

In 2002, France's highest court dropped manslaughter charges against nine photographers, including Jacques Langevin, Christian Martinez and Fabrice Chassery.

Last February, a Paris appeals court fined those three photographers 1 euro each for invasion of privacy for taking pictures of Diana and Fayed on the night of the crash.

Fayed's father, Mohamed Al Fayed, filed the invasion of privacy complaint, which focused on three photos of the couple leaving the hotel and three taken after the accident.
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