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THE chauffeur of the car in which Princess Diana died was working for the French secret service, the British team reinvestigating her death has been told.
The inquiry into the 1997 Paris car crash that killed Diana - headed by Lord Stevens, the former London Metropolitan police commissioner - is now trying to obtain the chauffeur's files from French intelligence but is being delayed by the reluctance of authorities to hand them over.
Lord Stevens's team has asked the country's domestic intelligence service, the DST, to surrender all its "agent handling" files on Henri Paul, the chauffeur, to establish whether he was doing any work for his French intelligence handlers on the night of the crash.
Paul crashed the car, killing himself, Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed in the Pont d'Alma tunnel in central Paris in 1997.
Well-placed sources say requests by the Stevens team for information about Paul's activities on the day of the crash, and demands for complete records of tests taken on Paul's blood after he died, have become bogged down by the "incredible bureaucracy" of the French justice system.
The delays mean the £4 million ($9.44 million) inquiry, ordered by the royal coroner in 2004, is certain to stretch into the latter part of this year and may not be completed before next year. French police concluded the crash was an accident, caused by Paul driving the Mercedes at high speed away from paparazzi while under the influence of drink and drugs.
The role of Paul, who was deputy head of security at the Paris Ritz hotel, and what he was doing in the hours up to the crash are central to the inquiry.
Mohamed al-Fayed, the Harrods tycoon and Dodi's father, has claimed Diana and his son were murdered by British intelligence. Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London Metropolitan police, disclosed last week that the French Government had finally confirmed Paul's employment by the DST during discussions last year.
A Scotland Yard source said: "We now know he was working for the French secret service and the French have to give us access to the records of what he was doing. We want to know where he was and what he was doing that evening."
After Paul's death, French police discovered he controlled secret accounts containing more than £100,000 in 14 banks across France.
The inquiry has been complicated by the apparent refusal of the French to allow Yard detectives to see several key witnesses to the accident.
Mr Fayed has claimed that MI6 agents visited the morgue on the night of the crash to plant evidence suggesting Paul was drunk, by substituting his blood for the alcohol-contaminated blood of a suicide victim. Lord Stevens still takes the view that Diana's death was an accident.
