Caveat Lector-
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,8232850%5E663,00.html
Diana was pregnant, report reveals
Ben English
London
22dec03
PRINCESS Diana was pregnant when she died, according to a senior police source in France.
But the source - who has seen all the documents relating to the princess's death - dismissed suggestions there was a conspiracy to murder Diana in 1997.
The source said medical reports that showed the Princess was pregnant were shelved and ordered never to be revealed to the public.
"I can tell you that she was pregnant," the source told Britain's Independent on Sunday newspaper.
The source indicated the cover-up was to spare the embarrassment of her family.
But those medical records may now be re-examined as part of the first British investigation into Diana's death, beginning next month.
French investigators decided Diana's pregnancy was not relevant to the cause of her death so French judge Herve Stephan never mentioned the fact when he finished his two-year investigation into the princess's death.
Friends of Diana and her butler, Paul Burrell, have strenuously denied suggestions she was expecting a third child at the time of her death.
The revelations will fuel conspiracy theories that the car crash -- which killed Diana, her companion Dodi Fayed and the driver in the early hours of August 31, 1997 -- was no accident.
But the source revealed the investigation dismissed any suggestion Diana was murdered.
He said the file pointed clearly to an accident, caused in part by the fact that chauffeur Henri Paul had been drinking heavily.
He was speaking after a British coroner announced that he would hold inquests on Diana and Dodi, beginning on January 6.
Medical reports from the hospital where Diana died may be included among the 6000 pages of documents from the French investigation that will be delivered to British royal coroner Michael Burgess next month.
Rumours that Diana was pregnant have circulated among royal watchers and have been seized on by wilder conspiracy theorists as a motive for her murder. One of the theories that has circulated during the past six years was that the royal family arranged for the "accident" because it feared Diana was pregnant to Dodi.
Buckingham Palace, according to one theory, hired MI6, the CIA and the French intelligence service to organise Diana's death because it did not want a Muslim linked to the royal family.
The police source in France rejected all such theories.
There has also been speculation about the time it has taken to call a British inquest, now routine when a British citizen dies abroad.
The coroner has said he could not open the hearings until he received the French file once legal proceedings taken by Dodi's father Mohammed al-Fayed were completed in France.
Among many conten tious pieces of evidence the coroner will have to evaluate is the letter written by Diana to Mr Burrell 10 months before her death, in which she predicts a car crash.