British royal family has 'ice water in veins'

London: The British royal family must have "ice water in their veins," says the father of Princess Diana's lover who will forever be convinced their deaths in a Paris car crash were not an accident.

"They took a young girl who was only 19 and they made her life hell," said Mohammad Al Fayed, an implacable foe of the House of Windsor, reflecting on Diana's fairytale marriage to Prince Charles that ended in bitter divorce.

The Egyptian-born tycoon who owns the luxury London store Harrods said in an interview to mark the 10th anniversary of the deaths of Diana and his eldest son Dodi: "The royal family must have ice water in their veins."

He has long maintained that his son and Diana were victims of an establishment conspiracy to prevent them from marrying.

"Agents of MI6 [the intelligence agency] or people working for MI6 or both combined to make sure that Dodi and Diana would never get back to London."

"I will never rest until I have exposed the whole murderous conspiracy. My son and Diana were slaughtered. I am not going to let them get away with it."

Investigations

The Palace does not usually comment on Al Fayed's claims. Two major investigations by both British and French police ruled that the high-speed crash was an accident blamed on drunken chauffeur Henri Paul who also died in the crash.

Despite a stream of stories linking her to various men, Diana was largely discreet about her companions until she dropped her reserve with millionaire Dodi in the weeks before her death.

Photographs of Diana and Dodi kissing on his luxury yacht in the Mediterranean were splashed over the world's press, which revelled in the real-life "princess and the playboy" soap opera.

Al Fayed will not give up and has employed a phalanx of lawyers to make his case at a much delayed London inquest - the official British inquiry where a jury will give a verdict on how the couple died.