The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, London

The car crash which killed princess Diana would not have happened if she had not ditched her police protection team several years previously, Britain's former top policeman told her inquest Thursday. Lord Paul Condon, the head of London's Metropolitan Police when she died in August 1997, said he begged Diana to keep a team of officers with her, telling her in 1993 that he was "really concerned" about her security. "Let me be absolutely frank," he told the High Court in London on his first day of evidence. "If as my wish, she would have had police protection in Paris, then I'm absolutely convinced those three lives would not have been tragically lost.