Insider breaks silence on Princess Diana's last words
A fire chief who was one of the first people to help Princess Diana after her fatal car crash in Paris has spoken for the first time about her final moments.
Sergeant Xavier Gourmelon told The Daily Mail that when he arrived at the scene in August 1997, Diana was still “moving and talking”.
“She spoke in English and said, ‘Oh my God, what’s happened?’ I could understand that, so I tried to calm her. I held her hand,” Sergeant Gourmelon said.
Sergeant Gourmelon had given his statement to police but this marks the first time he has spoken to the press about the tragedy.
The impact of the car hitting an underpass - estimated to have been travelling at around 105 km/h - had instantly killed driver Henri Paul and Diana’s new boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, according to the New York Post.
Sergeant Gourmelon recalled that Diana seemed physically fine besides an injured shoulder - but he had no idea he was trying to save a princess.
It was only after he had helped load Diana into an ambulance that he found out who she was from a captain also at the scene.
“He tells me who she is and then, yes, I recognise her, but in the moment I didn’t,” he said.
The same was also true for the first person to help her, off-duty doctor Frederic Mailliez, who had come across the crash while driving home from a party.
He saw “two [victims] were already apparently dead” and two others, including Diana’s bodyguard, “were seriously injured but still alive”.
He helped Diana first, who was in the back of the Mercedes on the floor.
“I discovered then she was a most beautiful woman and she didn’t have any [serious] injuries to her face. She was not bleeding [then] but she was almost unconscious and was having difficulty breathing,” he said.
“She looked fine for the first minutes,” he recalled.
“So I began to speak English to her, saying I was a doctor and that the ambulance was on its way and everything is going to be alright.”
Since he left the scene once emergency workers arrived, he said: “I left the scene without knowing who I had been treating.”
Image: Prince Harry / Instagram