Dodi Gave Di 'Friendship' Diamond

By
NICK WATT
via
September 4, 2006, 8:24 AM ET
2 min read

Sept. 3, 2006 — -- At the time of her death, Princess Diana was wearing a diamond ring given to her by Dodi Al-Fayed, according to a new book by Diana's former butler, Paul Burrell.

The $5,000 ring was a friendship ring, not an engagement ring, according to Burrell, who claims the princess was not ready to remarry.

"Her precise words to me were: 'I want another marriage like I want a bad rash,' " he writes in his new book, serialized in Britain's Mail on Sunday.

Why does the ring matter? Because Dodi's father, Mohammed Al-Fayed, claims his son, a Muslim, was about to pop the question, so the young lovers were killed on royal orders. It is a claim everyone implicated strenuously denies.

"He [Dodi's father] must accept the Princess and Dodi had no more than a summer fling," Burrell writes. "The world must stop believing Diana and Dodi were due to get married, because that simply isn't true."

Ingrid Seward, editor of Majesty Magazine, said that Burrell's motives may not be entirely pure.

"Paul Burrell needs to make money, and he makes money from his memories of Diana," Seward said. "But they are pretty valid, because he was there and nobody else was."

Investigations into Diana's death have fanned the flames for conspiracy theorists. French investigators concluded the couple's driver, Henri Paul, was to blame. He was drunk, they said.

But last week French authorities reopened that investigation, apparently because of unanswered questions regarding the blood samples.

"The longer it goes on, the more suspicions one has that maybe there was more to it," Seward said.

British investigators have interviewed more than 1,500 people in the nine years since the crash, but still have not held an inquest.

That inquest is now set to take place next year with one of Britain's most senior judges brought out of retirement to take the reigns.

The royal coroner, who was supposed to preside but controversially backed out at the 11th hour, has said the probe into Diana's death is "far more complex than any of us thought."