LONDON (AFP) - The driver of the car which carried Princess Diana to her death was drunk and "walking like a clown" shortly before the crash, a witness at her inquest said Thursday.
"I saw him drunk," Alain Willaumez, a barman at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, told the inquest into the 1997 death of Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed in a Paris road tunnel.
A French police probe and an official British investigation concluded that the crash was an accident, and that Paul was over the drink-drive limit when he took the wheel on the night of August 30, 1997.
The inquest heard that Paul had spent 40 minutes in the hotel bar from 10:00 pm, while Williaumez said Paul was "staggering like a drunk," according to a statement to police read to the London hearings.
"I could see first through his eyes and also the way he talked, but more especially in his eyes. His eyes were brilliant, wide open and he was visibly in an abnormal condition," he added, speaking by videolink from Paris.
As he left the bar he bumped into a colleague. "He had not a precise walk. He was walking like a clown, a little bit like a clown," said the French barman.
Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul were killed instantly in the Paris car crash, while Diana died from internal injures a few hours later.
Fayeds father Mohammed, the owner of London department store Harrods, claims they were killed by a British Establishment conspiracy to prevent Diana marrying a Muslim and having his child.
