A worker at the Paris Ritz Hotel has claimed that a jeweller cooked up stories that Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed visited his outlet to choose an engagement ring.
LONDON: A worker at the Paris Ritz Hotel has claimed that a jeweller cooked up stories that Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Al-Fayed visited his outlet to choose an engagement ring hours before the couple were killed in a car crash ten years back.
"As best as I can remember, it was a kind of romantic story that Dodi asked for an engagement ring and that they had to choose together the engagement ring, which was not the truth.
"I know that a few days after the accident, Repossi started giving different accounts of the events and that his director of communications, Gilles Montrichard, advised him against making things up," former Ritz executive Claude Roulet told the jury at the Diana inquest.
The testimony came a day after a former butler of Dodi Al-Fayed had claimed that he saw his boss down on one knee touching the Princess' tummy just hours before the couple were killed in the car crash in the Alma tunnel on August 31, 1997.
Rene Delorm had also told the jury that Dodi had asked him to prepare champagne as he was going to propose to the Princess of Wales and he witnessed the couple going into a jeweller's shop in Monte Carlo earlier in 1997.
"He (Dodi) said: 'Rene, have some champagne ready because when I come back I'm going to propose to the Princess.' The next thing he did, he reached into his pocket, he took out a box and I saw the ring.
"I couldn't believe -- why I couldn't believe? -- because all these years sometimes I used to say, 'Why don't you get married, you are a good looking man... you are smart, you are rich, all you need is a family', and he said nothing.
"And here I am standing in front of a man who was going to propose to the Princess and I was very excited," Delorm told the jury via videophone from Los Angeles.
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