The only survivor of the car crash that resulted in Princess Diana ’s death has been pictured for the first time in five years.
Trevor Rees-Jones, who is now head of security for AstraZeneca, was photographed outside a Morrisons store in Shropshire, waiting for his family while they picked up some shopping.
Scars appeared to still be visible on the former bodyguard's face from the car crash, which also took the lives of Diana’s chauffeur Henri Paul and her partner Dodi Al Fayed.
The Princess died from injuries that she sustained in the car accident that happened in the early hours of August 31, 1997.
She had been in a car driving through the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, France when it crashed into the 13th pillar of the tunnel.
Dodi Fayed, and the driver of the car, Henri Paul, were pronounced dead at the scene, while Diana and her bodyguard were rushed to hospital.
In 2008, an inquest into Diana's death found that both Henri Paul and the paparazzi contributed to her death.
The jury decided that Diana and Dodi had been unlawfully killed by Henri, who had been found to have alcohol in his system at the time of the accident.
Lord Justice Scott Baker said the crash had been caused by both "the speed and manner of the driving of the Mercedes" as well as "the speed and manner of driving of the following vehicles", which were paparazzi vehicles.
Trevor, a former soldier, now lives a quiet life in Shropshire where he stays away from the public eye.
A source told The Sun on Sunday : “Trevor is living a peaceful life. The enormity of what happened that night is still with him and the scars are visible.”
They added: "His life is quiet and uneventful now. He certainly doesn’t court publicity or speak much about it."
After serving in the parachute regiment, Rees-Jones did a tour of Northern Ireland before leaving the armed forces to work for billionaire Mohammed Al-Fayed, better known as Dodi Al-Fayed.
In the summer of 1997 the relationship between the Egyptian owner of Harrods and the People's Princess blossomed.
One of the things Diana liked about holidaying with the Al-Fayeds in the south of France, some biographers have speculated, is the large private security team that travelled with them.
It was amongst this that the Princess found herself when she headed to the Ritz Hotel in Paris on August 30.
It was clear from the start that the stay would not be a relaxing one however, with a group of 30 paparazzi on the group's tail.
In a bid to lose the photographers Paul, the Ritz's deputy security head, suggested the two cars the group had been travelling that day leave from the front of the hotel.
Paul would drive the Princess and Dodi in one of the hotel's limos out the back.
“I wasn’t happy as it meant Dodi would be splitting the security officers, but I went along with it,” Trevor would later tell an inquest into the Princess's death.
“Initially, I had been told that Dodi and Diana would travel without security and I said this would not happen, that I would travel in the vehicle with them.”
With cars full of paparazzi in hot pursuit, the journey came to an abrupt halt when the Mercedes S280 limo smashed into the tunnel's 13th pillar.
The smash would have a devastating impact on Trevor, who suffered severe brain and chest trauma, spent 10 days in a coma and broke every bone in his face.
Surgeons had to use old photos of his face as a reconstruction guide, piecing it back together with 150 pieces of titanium.
“His face looked like it had been hit by a frying pan in a Tom and Jerry cartoon — smashed back and flattened," his mother Gill said after the operation.
When the wreckage of that night had been cleared away and Diana laid to rest in an emotionally charged public funeral, a renewed focus was turned to those closest to her when she died.
Pushed for details, Rees said the last thing he remembered of the night was climbing into the car at the Ritz.
That meant there was a “missing” four minutes from his memory.
In an interview three years after the crash, Rees-Jones said: “I’m the only person who can tell people for real, and I can’t remember.
"It will be so easy if I do remember. I can tell people and all this c**p will finish.”
A year after the smash Rees-Jones had stopped working for Al-Fayed, who believed the British security services were behind the crash.
The billionaire would accuse the veteran of betraying him and, according to Rees-Jones, put "intense" pressure on him to somehow dig up lost memories of the crash.
