Princess Diana's mother and Dodi Fayed's father entered the Paris courtroom separately on June 5--he emerging from a limo and ascending the front steps with a clutch of bodyguards, she slipping quietly through a side door. The bereaved pair had not met since Diana's funeral on Sept. 6, but Frances Shand Kydd and Mohamed Al Fayed didn't trade condolences. Seated on the same bench, they spoke not a word to each other during the eight-hour proceedings, convened by Judge Herve Stephan to try to reconcile accounts of the crash that killed Diana and Dodi. "She wasn't glaring at him," said one observer. "She was ignoring him in a dignified fashion, which annoyed him."
Shand Kydd, 62, was most likely communicating her family's disdain for Al Fayed, 69, who has made public his belief that a racist British establishment, objecting to Diana's romance with the Egyptian-born Dodi, had them both murdered. Ever alert for slights, the billionaire owner of London's Harrods department store and Paris's Ritz Hotel responded with ire. "I'm a working-class guy, but she thinks she is the Queen of Sheba," he told the assembled press. "If she...doesn't want to talk to ordinary people like me, it's up to her. She's a snob." And that was just for starters. "She did not give a damn about her daughter, and her daughter did not give a damn about her," he said. "If you leave your child when she's 6 [as Shand Kydd did], how can you call yourself a mother?"
The outburst was the dramatic high point in an otherwise businesslike hearing (the paparazzi insisted, again, that they had been too far behind Dodi's Mercedes to cause the crash). But the vitriol did little to salvage Al Fayed's eroding reputation (in Britain the next day, The Sun described him as a "reptile"). He was arrested last March, following allegations of theft from a business rival's safe deposit box (the matter is still being investigated by police), while a former Ritz employee has recently claimed that the hotel told him to lie about driver Henri Paul's drinking. To worsen matters, appearing on British ITV's London Tonight on June 2 alongside Raine Countess Spencer (Di's stepmother and a director of Harrods International), Al Fayed said Diana had told him she and Dodi were getting engaged--contradicting his past assertion that Dodi was merely planning to propose.
The next night an ITV documentary, done with Al Fayed's cooperation, gave credence to the death plot and featured a claim by James Hewitt, Diana's kiss-and-tell lover, that an unnamed royal once threatened him: " 'We can't be responsible for your safety and security and suggest you curtail [the affair].' "
Still, aside from a smattering of conspiracy buffs, Al Fayed has found little support. On June 4 a documentary on Britain's respected Channel 4, and subsequent newspaper reports, debunked so-called "proof" of a conspiracy. Henri Paul had carbon monoxide in his blood? An expert said that wasn't unusual. A witness to the crash saw a strange flash--the kind used by the British secret service to disorient foes? Police long ago had determined that the witness was a crank. As for Al Fayed's claims that Diana spoke final words after the accident, a French government official said, "I can confirm...that she did not utter a single word."
Despite the evidence contradicting Al Fayed's contentions, he shows no signs of backing off (results of the investigation won't be released until this fall). "Responsibility for the crash has to rest somewhere, and the bottom line is Henri Paul was a Ritz employee," says former Harrods security advisor Bob Loftus. "[The conspiracy talk] is a smoke screen." Al Fayed describes his reasons in purer terms: It is God's wish that he uncover the truth, he told London Tonight. But Frances Shand Kydd, who left Paris for her Scotland home without speaking to reporters, also answers to a higher authority. "Diana's will...stated her wishes to me," she said in a statement. "I shall try my utmost, all my days, to carry out...what she asked of me."
