LONDON: Chauffeur Henri Paul might have drunk up to eight glasses of strong spirits before he drove Princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed to their deaths in a Paris tunnel ten years back, it has been claimed.
Robert Forrest, a Professor of Forensic Toxicology at Sheffield University, told the jury at the Diana inquest that Paul was twice the legal drink-drive limit in Britain and more than three times the French when he took to the wheel.
Claiming that there had been some deficiencies in the French testing procedure, Prof Forrest said his calculations were approximate. "I have no major reservations about the interpretation of these results," the British media quoted him as testifying at the inquest on Monday.
Asked whether even drinking the last two glasses of Ricard an hour or so before the crash would have had an affect on Paul's ability to drive, he said, "I would not willingly get into a car with someone who had drunk two Ricards, so the
answer to that question is yes."
The jury had earlier been told that the 41-year-old bachelor had a blood alcohol level of 1.74 grams per of alcohol per litre of blood at the time of his death.
But Prof Forrest said that Paul may have drunk a "significantly greater" amount of alcohol than that. He said that he would have had to consume at least 240 ml of Ricard for the alcohol reading to be at that level.
"The results are unlikely to reflect taking two 50 ml doses of Ricard in the couple of hours or so before death. It is likely to reflect the consumption of a significantly greater amount of alcohol than that," he told the jury.
