- LONDON (AFP) - The car carrying
Diana, princess of Wales and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed may have bumped into
another large, dark-coloured car shortly before crashing, the inquest into
their deaths heard Monday.
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- Witness accounts previously have talked about a white
Fiat Uno or a similar small vehicle, but Jean-Claude Catheline and his
wife Annick said they saw two dark cars travelling at speed side-by-side
going into the Pont d'Alma tunnel in Paris.
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- Another witness meanwhile said he saw a "major white
flash" in the tunnel just before the crash occurred there on the night
of August 30, 1997, before seeing Diana's car "going from left to
right to left again."
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- The Cathelines told how, as they walked on an embankment
near the tunnel, they heard a collision followed moments later by the sound
of tyres screeching and then a crash.
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- "As soon as the car disappeared from our view we
heard what sounded like the bodywork bumping, I think that this noise was
before the car entered the tunnel," he told the inquest by video link
from Paris.
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- Citing from his statement to police, a lawyer said Catheline
then almost immediately heard "a second noise, very, very loud, quite
different from the first: it was a dull noise and followed by a second,
identical noise.
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- "I heard the tyres screeching on the road,"
added the Frenchman, who was returning with his wife to their car after
visiting the nearby Eiffel Tower.
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- His wife told how, after seeing the two cars together
going into the tunnel, "we heard noises like two cars bumping each
other."
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- Another witness, Francois Levistre, told of seeing a
white flash in his rear view mirror as he went through the tunnel ahead
of Diana's Mercedes.
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- Also speaking by video-link from Paris, he told how Diana's
car was overtaken by a motorbike when he saw the flash, like the light
from a police radar.
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- "I realised there was this major white flash of
the motorbike in front of the Mercedes, in front of the car," he said.
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- "I was nearly at the exit of the tunnel and I realised
that because I heard the noise of the motorbike within the tunnel... I
just wondered what happened because the light was like you were caught
by the police in a radar."
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- Levistre also described how Diana's car veered across
the road.
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- "When I saw the light, I looked into the mirror...
I saw the car going from left to right to left again to get within the
pillar," he said, speaking through a translator.
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- Diana, ex-wife of heir to the throne Prince Charles,
her Egyptian boyfriend Dodi Fayed and their chauffeur Henri Paul were killed
in a high-speed car crash in the Pont d'Alma tunnel.
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- Fayed's father Mohamed Al-Fayed, the tycoon owner of
London's upscale Harrods department store, believes they were killed in
a plot hatched by Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, and the
British security services.
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- The plot was conceived because Diana, 36, was carrying
Fayed's unborn child and the royal family did not want her to marry a Muslim,
Al-Fayed alleges.
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