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Diana inquest: Royal coffin kept ready

A special coffin is always kept ready by the British Queen's undertakers in case a member of the Royal Family suddenly dies abroad.

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LONDON: A special coffin is always kept ready by the British Queen's undertakers in case a member of the Royal Family suddenly dies abroad, the inquest into the death of Princess Diana has heard.
 
Leverton & Sons, a 200-year-old firm, appointed as the Royal undertakers in 1991, used its "first call" coffin to bring back the body of the Princess of Wales from Paris where she was killed, alongside her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed, in a
car crash ten years back.
 
"We have some plans for some members of the Royal Family and there is an overall operational plan involving repatriation if there is a death abroad or, say, in Scotland, where road transport would not be practical," the Director of the company, Clive Leverton, told the inquest jury on Thursday.
 
Describing the events in the aftermath of the tragedy in the Alma tunnel in Paris on August 31, 1997, Leverton, who flew to the French capital the day after, said the casket's design allowed it to be hermetically sealed "although time constraints meant this wasn't done on the day of repatriation of Diana's body", the media reported here on Friday.
 
The 11-member also heard that the team of French experts who embalmed the Princess had a special name for her.
 
"I remember among ourselves that we did not call the Princess of Wales by her proper name but called her Patricia," Huguette Amarger, one of the embalmers, said in a statement read out to the court.
 
She also recalled that Diana's butler, Paul Burrell, was "crying a lot" and that she had asked him to fetch clothes to dress the body of the Princess.
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