Emergency staff who were on the scene of Princess Diana's fatal car crash have recalled her final moments. Photo / AP
Emergency staff who were on the scene of Princess Diana's fatal car crash have recalled her final moments. Photo / AP
One of the first people on the scene of Princess Diana's fatal Paris car crash has spoken out for the first time to share her final words.
Fire chief Sergeant Xavier Gourmelon told the Daily Mail that when he arrived on the scene in August 1997, Diana was still "moving and talking", reports the New York Post.
He recalled that she turned to him and said, "Oh my God, what's happened?"
"I could understand that, so I tried to calm her," Gourmelon recalled. "I held her hand."
The fire chief had given statements to police in the past, but had never spoken to the press until now.
The Post reports that the impact of the crash into an underpass, said to have been at around 105km/h, had already immediately killed Diana's boyfriend Dodi Fayed as well as the car's driver Henri Paul.
Gourmelon, who at first had no idea who Diana was, recalled that she seemed physically fine apart from a shoulder injury.
It was only after he helped her into an ambulance that he discovered who she was from a captain on the scene. He told the outlet, "He tells me who she is and then yes, I recognise her, but in the moment I didn't."
And the same was true for the very first person to help Diana. Off-duty doctor Frederic Mailliez came across the scene while on his way home from a party.
Mailliez said "two were already apparently dead" and that two others, Diana and her bodyguard, were "severely injured but still alive".
The chaplain called to the scene instantly thought of Diana's young sons William and Harry. Photo / Getty Images
He rushed to help Diana, who was "sitting on the floor in the back" of the car.
"I discovered then she was a most beautiful woman and she didn't have any [serious] injuries to her face. She was not bleeding [then] but she was almost unconscious and was having difficulty breathing ... She looked fine for the first minutes," he said.
"So I began to speak English to her, saying that I was a doctor and that the ambulance was on its way and everything is going to be all right."
Mailliez left when emergency services arrived. "I left the scene without knowing who I had been treating."
Police remove the crumpled wreck of the Mercedez-Benz from the underpass in Paris.
When the hospital's duty chaplain Father Yves-Marie Clochard-Bossuet was called to attend, he was so shocked he hung up the phone repeatedly, thinking it was a prank.
But he finally came to the scene, recalling he saw Diana covered by a sheet after being pronounced dead.
The chaplain instantly thought of Diana's two sons Princes Harry and William.
"They are going to have to wake them up and tell them, 'It's over' … It is the worst thing," he recalled.
