The man who owns the Mercedes involved in the crash that killed Princess Diana says he wants it back. Jean-Francois-Musa said the car was "legally mine".
Mr Musa ran Etoile Limousines at the time of the fatal crash in 1997. Now, as the 25th anniversary approaches this week, he is demanding it be returned by the French authorities.
He said he had not even been told where the wrecked Mercedes-Benz S280 is being kept. The car has been the focus of conspiracy theories that Diana was assassinated since it crashed in Paris’s Pont de l’Alma tunnel on August 31, 1997, reports the Irish Mirror. Experts believe the wreck could be worth up to £10million.
Speaking from his holiday home in Normandy, Mr Musa said: “I have no idea where the car is. All I know is it is legally mine and obviously I want it back. It should have been returned by now but that hasn’t proved possible. I always owned it outright. It wasn’t subject to any financing.”
Mr Musa, 63, has said he wants the car displayed in a US museum to honour Diana. But the royals have always indicated they would prefer it to be disposed of discreetly.
In 2017, it was being kept in a shipping container in a police car pound near Creteil, on the outskirts of Paris. The Mirror visited and a worker said: “It was kept here but it was moved several years ago. I don’t know where it is. You will have to ask the Maire de Paris.”
The Mirror called the Mayor’s office but it would not say where the car was. An 18-month French judicial probe found the crash, which killed Diana, 36, boyfriend Dodi Fayed, 42, and driver Henri Paul, 41, was caused by Paul, who was drunk and on antidepressants, losing control while speeding.
This was backed up by Operation Paget, the Met inquiry that ended in 2006. Then, a 2008 inquest in London said Diana and Dodi were the victims of an “unlawful killing” caused by Paul’s “grossly negligent” behaviour.
It put an end to claims by Dodi’s billionaire father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, that the crash was a plot orchestrated by MI6 on the order of the royal family. Etoile Limousines once had a contract with the Paris Ritz – the hotel Mr Fayed owns and which Diana had left in the car that fateful night.
“There was no plot,” said Mr Musa. “This was a routine road accident – the kind all of us dread. It is all very sad.”
Asked how he would be spending the 25th anniversary of Diana’s death, Mr Musa said: “I’ll be out of Paris, in a different part of France. It’s a sad day.”
Meanwhile, it emerged that Paul’s father, Jean, died last year, aged 89. He was said to have remained convinced someone tampered with the car and his son died in a plot to murder Diana.
A friend in Lorient, Brittany, said: “He knew Henri was a competent driver. He told me, ‘The car was old and dangerous and shouldn’t have been driven.’”
Crucial parts of Princess Diana’s crashed car were destroyed in a mystery fire which was covered up by the French. The news was only uncovered by the Daily Mirror seven years after the blaze happened in May 1999. The front right door, which bore traces of a sideswipe with a white Fiat Uno, was incinerated in the blaze while the limo was in storage.
When the Mirror was tipped off about the fire, it took six months for France’s Deputy Public Prosecutor Sylvie Petit-Leclair to admit the fire had broken out, but she insisted it was not deliberate. Then the car’s right wing was destroyed, probably crushed, in 2003 after criminal proceedings against nine photographers were ended by France’s highest court.
Petit-Leclair said France allows “the destruction of objects once all legal actions have terminated”.
