Word: dodi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...time was short. Dodi and Diana had an 8:30 reservation that night at Benoit, a trendy one-star restaurant near the Place des Vosges. Sometime after 9 p.m., the couple headed off to dinner. Realizing en route that their plans for a quiet meal at Benoit would be spoiled by the photographers piling up outside the restaurant, Dodi suddenly opted to return to the marbled pillars and plush carpeting of the Ritz, where hotel security could be counted on to fend off the photographers...
...thought. When their Mercedes pulled up in front of the hotel's main entrance in the Place Vendome at about 9:45, some paparazzi were already there, causing the couple to wait several minutes in the car before getting out. A visibly flustered Dodi exchanged some heated words with them before disappearing through the revolving door. Even at the hotel's two-star restaurant Espadon (French for "swordfish"), the stares of fellow diners made Dodi uncomfortable. The couple were all the more eye-catching in the formal Espadon because they were still wearing the casual clothes--jeans and cowboy boots...
...time Diana and Dodi's last meal ended, 20 or more photographers were still waiting outside the hotel. Inside, it was decided that Dodi's Mercedes and the black Range Rover that Diana had used for shopping, both cars familiar to the paparazzi, would be used as decoy vehicles to lure them away. To complete the illusion, Dodi's regular driver was assigned to the Range Rover. Meanwhile, Dodi, Diana and a Fayed bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, 29, would be driven away by Paul in a smaller Mercedes 280 leased by the hotel. At 12:20 a.m. Paul pulled that...
Fayed spokesmen deny the claim that as he drove away, Paul taunted the paparazzi with "You won't catch us." A few paparazzi followed the decoy cars, but others soon spotted the car carrying Diana and Dodi and took pursuit. In an interview with Liberation, the photographer Langevin said that after the Mercedes left the Ritz, it proceeded normally, along with its entourage of paparazzi on motorbikes, until it reached a traffic light at the Place de la Concorde, a few blocks away. "Everybody stopped as usual at the red light," he said. "That's when the Mercedes took...
...Jones, the only passenger wearing a seat belt, was alive but badly hurt, his jaw shattered and his tongue reportedly severed. If Diana had been wearing a seat belt, would she have survived? Though the front of the car was crushed, the rear passenger compartment, in which she and Dodi were riding, was not. She came to rest in the footwell, slumped so that she was facing toward the rear of the car with her head leaning against the right side door. A trail of blood descended from her right ear. Dodi, already dead, was lying prone across the rear...