Prince Harry: ‘I Saw Photographers Taking Pictures of My Dying Mother’

Prince Harry has shared how he discovered a group of photographers taking pictures of his mother’s death after he viewed photos of the crash scene where Princess Diana died.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper aired on CNN last night, the Duke of Sussex reveals he requested to view the police report about the 1997 crash that took place in a tunnel in Paris.

The interview serves as a promotion for Harry’s upcoming memoir Spare, in the book he writes: “The last thing mummy ever saw on this Earth was a flashbulb.”

The Duke reveals that the pictures he saw in the police file proved that the paparazzi chasing Diana’s car on that fateful night took photos of his “half-dead mother.”

He says: “The pictures showed the reflection of a group of photographers taking photographs through the window and the reflection in the window was them.”

Princess Diana was 36-years-old when she died in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel alongside her boyfriend, Dodi Al-Fayed, and driver, Henri Paul.

The Duke says he was dissuaded by his private secretary and advisor from seeing any graphic photos of his mother’s death.

“All I saw was the back of my mum’s head — slumped on the back seat,” he says.

“There were other more gruesome photographs, but I will be eternally grateful to him for denying me the ability to inflict pain on myself by seeing that. Because that’s the kind of stuff that sticks in your mind, forever.”

Blame

Prince Harry, who stepped back from the Royal Family with his wife Meghan Markle in 2020, blames paparazzi photographers for his mother’s death.

“I think one of the hardest things to come to terms with is the fact that the people that chased her into the tunnel were the same people that were taking photographs of her while she was still dying on the back seat of the car,” Harry said in a 2017 BBC documentary.

He not only blames the paparazzi for causing the crash but has also accused them of standing by and watching her die.

“She had quite a severe head injury but she was very much still alive in the back seat and those people that caused the accident, instead of helping they were taking photographs in the back seat and then those photographs made their way back to news desks,” Harry said.

News organizations in the United Kingdom adhere to the Editors’ Code of Practice. The photos of Diana’s death were in clear breach of Clause 4; intrusion into grief or shock. Hence, they were never published.

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