Diana paparazzo's burnt body found
David Leppard and Gavin Walsh
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/06/04/sti nwenws03006.html

Diana: media target
(c)

A KEY witness in the police investigation into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales has been found dead in mysterious circumstances in remote woodland in southern France.

The charred body of James Andanson, a leading paparazzo who hounded Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed in the days before their deaths in Paris, was found by soldiers on military exercise in a burnt-out car near the village of Nant.

Andanson, 54, was initially a suspect in the criminal inquiry by French police into the car crash which killed Diana, Dodi and Henri Paul, their driver, in August 1997. He and his family were questioned about his involvement with the pack of photographers that trailed the couple as they holidayed in the Mediterranean in the week before the crash.

Andanson was also quizzed about his ownership of a white Fiat Uno, of the sort that clipped the princess's Mercedes as it sped into the Alma tunnel, where the accident occurred. Although the car and its driver have never been traced, Hervé Stéphan, the judge investigating the crash, concluded that the presence of a white Fiat Uno was a significant cause of the tragedy.

Detectives are puzzled by Andanson's death, which they say occurred in a "very discreet and isolated" woodland in the Aveyron region of southwestern France. His body was said to have been burnt almost beyond recognition. Although found four weeks ago, Andanson was formally identified by DNA tests only last week.

He had been missing since leaving his Paris home at the beginning of last month. This weekend police said they had not ruled out foul play. Lieutenant-Colonel Gerry Plane said that although Andanson had been showing serious suicidal tendencies, there would always be doubts about his death.

Extracts from confidential police files obtained by The Sunday Times show that detectives established that Andanson was in possession of a white Fiat Uno at the time of the crash in August 1997. Detectives said, however, that the paint on Andanson's Fiat did not match that recovered from the scrape marks on the Mercedes.

The car was seized by police five months after the crash from a car dealer, to whom Andanson had sold it in October 1997. It was of such interest to Mohamed al-Fayed, Dodi's father and the owner of Harrods, that a detective working for him took photographs of it and offered to buy it. Andanson's son, also called James, said last week that his father never spoke about the Paris crash. "At the moment, we don't know why my father died," he said.

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