Di's Death: The Investigation

PARIS: Fate was brutally unkind that August night when it brought Princess Diana to the French capital. It saddled her not only with a reckless, daredevil drunk-driver, but also an emergency care system that -- by wasting precious time treating her at the scene, instead of rushing her to the hospital -- proved disastrous for dealing with her type of injury. So say TIME Paris bureau chief Tom Sancton and Middle East Correspondent Scott MacLeod in their new book, Death of A Princess: The Investigation. In extracts published exclusively in TIME magazine, Sancton and MacLeod reveal how Diana's injury, a torn pulmonary vein, is survivable. But, as one American doctor says, "time is of the essence." It took nearly two hours from the time of the crash to transport Diana a mere four miles to hospital, via slow-moving French ambulance. "If they'd have gotten her there in an hour," says the doctor, "they might have saved her."

And what of Henri Paul, the chauffeur so loaded with alcohol that his vision may have been blurred as he smashed into the Alma tunnel's 13th pillar? Sancton and MacLeod reveal Paul's history of daredevil stunts in passenger planes, and how his final stunt was to drink whiskey-strength aperitifs -- right under the noses of Dodi Fayed's bodyguards. Another irony: Mohammed Al-Fayed, in his first post-crash interview, tells Sancton and MacLeod how he begged Dodi not to go from the rear of the hotel with a substitute driver. Dodi didn't heed Mohammed's advice and the world still mourns the consequences.