Mohamed Al Fayed, the father of Princess Diana's boyfriend, has lost a legal bid to gag a witness who has spoken about the night the couple were killed in a car crash.
Mohamed Al Fayed, the father of Princess Diana's boyfriend Dodi, has lost a legal bid to gag a witness who has spoken about the night the couple were killed in a car crash in Paris nearly 12 years back.
Al Fayed had sued Claude Roulet, the manager of Ritz Hotel in Paris, who was on duty the night Diana and Dodi died, for 17,000 pounds over TV interviews he gave after last year's inquests into the fatal crash, and sought to silence him from speaking to the media again.
But, a tribunal in the French capital has ruled in the favour of the 58-year-old former manager of Al Fayed's hotel, British newspaper the 'Daily Mail' reported.
Roulet had been a key witness at the inquests, where he undermined Al Fayed's claim that Dodi and the Princess had been "murdered by MI6" in a plot masterminded by members of the British Royal Family.
The inquests found the couple had been "unlawfully killed" by a combination of Henri Paul -- the Ritz's speeding drunk driver -- and the pursuing paparazzi.
Roulet had been one of Al Fayed's trusted lieutenants until he quit in 2004. He had been chosen to greet Diana and Dodi on their arrival at the hotel, and he selected a ring for Dodi to give to Diana.
He was also the man who met Al Fayed hours after the 1997 crash, and took him to see Dodi's body in a Paris morgue.
However, he told last year's inquest that Al Fayed had not seen Princess Diana's corpse, as he had claimed, and also described how Henri Paul actually appeared "a little tipsy" on the night of the crash.
The Ritz claimed Roulet's TV interviews broke the terms agreed when he left the company. But his lawyers argued that as his comments were already public, having been given in evidence, they did not violate that agreement.
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