Princess Diana died in a Paris car crash
On this day · 31 August 1997
In the early hours of one August night, a high-speed crash in a Paris tunnel killed the world's most photographed woman and stunned a watching planet.
Diana, Princess of Wales died on Sunday, 31 August 1997, after the Mercedes carrying her crashed at high speed in the Place de l’Alma underpass in central Paris shortly before midnight. Rushed to the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, she underwent roughly two hours of emergency surgery before being declared dead at 3:00 a.m. BST. She was 36.
The driver, Henri Paul, and Diana’s companion Dodi Fayed also died; bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was the lone survivor. Later inquiries found Paul had been drinking heavily and that none of the occupants wore seat belts as paparazzi pursued the car.
The death of this hugely popular figure triggered an unprecedented wave of public mourning.
Flowers piled metres deep outside royal palaces, and an estimated audience in the billions watched her funeral at Westminster Abbey on 6 September 1997. A 2008 inquest jury later returned a verdict of unlawful killing, citing the gross negligence of the driver and the pursuing photographers.
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