Police investigations into Princess Diana’s death examined in new series

A new series is to look at the two official inquests into Princess Diana’s death.

The British king died in a car accident in Paris in 1997 at the age of 36. The French Brigade Criminelle opened an investigation in 1997 immediately after the accident, while the Metropolitan Police took over their own investigation seven years later in 2004.

Although the accident was investigated by officials on both sides of the Channel, Diana’s death continued to attract wild conspiracy theories over the decades.

Now Channel 4 has commissioned “Investigating Diana: Death in Paris” (still working title) from Sandpaper Films to co-produce with Discovery+. billed as a police procedural docu-series.

Directed by Will Jessop and Barnaby Pell, the four-part series will speak to a number of leading detectives in both the UK and France, many of whom have never spoken in public before, in an attempt to separate fact from fiction .

“The series will hear how the detectives chased every lead while maneuvering between unreliable witnesses and faulty memories,” the logline reads. “It will also examine the public’s insatiable demand for answers, which fueled unprecedented press interest and the proliferation of online chat rooms, where speculation about the ‘real cause’ of Diana’s death became one of the first viral sensations of the early internet. ».

Natacha Brounais and Miriam Jones are set to produce.

“This was a really important series to do — not least because it will hopefully put an end to the conspiracy theories that continue to obscure the truth of what happened in the Alma Tunnel [in Paris] that night — but because the story is a window into the world today, where conspiracy theories are no longer in the dark corners of the Internet, but have gone mainstream and are actually being pushed by people in positions of real power,” said Henry Singer. executive producer of Sandpaper Films.

Shaminder Nahal, Channel 4’s Head of Special Events and Commissioning, says: “This utterly compelling series explores in forensic detail what happened at the inquests into Princess Diana’s death – what it was like for detectives working on a huge global news story This was not only a tragedy for the families involved, but also a huge online phenomenon. Ultimately the series asks deep questions about ourselves as a society and the nature of truth.”