In a long interview given on Sunday to the American program 60 minutes, Prince Harry returned to the death of Lady Diana. He reveals that he held “an enormous hope” that she was alive, and that the Parisian car accident that took her away when he was 12, on August 31, 1997, was just staged.
“For a long time I refused to accept that she was gone,” Prince Harry said in this interview broadcast on CBS. “On one hand, I thought she would never do this to us, on the other, I thought maybe it was all part of a plan.”
William “had similar thoughts”
During this interview, broadcast ahead of the release of his memoir on Tuesday (alternateFayard), journalist Anderson Cooper asked her if she really thought she was alive and had decided to disappear:
“(Disappear) for a while,” Prince Harry replied. “And that one day she would call us to join her (he and hers brother William, editor’s note).” A belief held for “many, many years. William and I talked about it. He had similar thoughts.”
He describes this hope in his book: “I often thought, when I woke up, ‘Maybe it’s today. Maybe it’s today that she’ll show up again.'”
A “decade of unrelenting pain”
According to CBS, at the age of 20, Prince Harry asked to see the police report on the car accident, as well as some photos of the tragedy: “(He wanted) evidence that she was in the car, that she had been injured.”
Three years later, when he first visited Paris, he asked a driver to take the Alma tunnel in Paris, where Diana died, to end a “decade of unrelenting pain.”
He reveals that he and his brother have “considered reopening the investigation”, which ended with a “tragic accident”: “There are so many unknowns in it,” he believes. However, although he doesn’t “think” that he has all the answers, he eventually declares that he doesn’t need to “know more than he already knows”.
Two interviews with Prince Harry were broadcast on Sunday (one on the US channel CBS, the other on the British channel ITV), and a third is expected on Monday on the show. Good morning america. The memories of him, whose first revelations have made the headlines of the British press for a week, have made the monarchy tremble. In particular, he reveals a violent altercation with his brother, behind the scenes of her departure from the UK with his wife Meghan Markle, and lingering tensions between the couple and the royal family.
Source: BFM TV
