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Here's why Princess Diana's bodyguard 'Rambo' believes she would still be alive if he was on duty

Diana and her partner Dodi Fayed were killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997
PUBLISHED AUG 15, 2022
Lee Sansum (R) was called Rambo by Princess Diana (Hulton Archive/Getty Images and @leesansum/Instagram)
Lee Sansum (R) was called Rambo by Princess Diana (Hulton Archive/Getty Images and @leesansum/Instagram)

SCOTLAND, UNITED KINGDOM: Princess Diana has fascinated the public for years and it’s been more than two decades of her fatal car crash but she continues to live in people’s hearts. However, talking about the Princess of Wales, her former security guard, Lee Sansum, believes she’d still be alive if he had been traveling with her on the night she died.

Diana and her partner Dodi Fayed were killed in a car crash in Paris in August 1997, along with their driver Henri Paul, while her bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones was seriously injured. In an exclusive interview with The Sun, the 60-year-old Sansum opened up about how it could have been him in that car; and how he and the other security guards drew straws to see who would accompany Jones in the car with Diana. "We drew straws to see who would be accompanying Trevor that weekend. I pulled a match and it was a long one," he recollected.

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Sansum, who the Princess of Wales nicknamed Rambo and with whom she revealed her biggest fears and future plans, told the outlet, "When I learned they were not wearing seatbelts in the crash I understood why they didn’t survive. That shouldn’t have happened. It was standard practice for the family to wear seatbelts. It was an order sent down from the boss, Dodi’s dad Mohamed Fayed. Dodi, in particular, hated wearing seatbelts and I always insisted on it.”

Burnley-born Sansum worked for Dodi’s father Mohamed Al-Fayed and was assigned to look after the couple when they stayed at the former Harrods’ boss’ 30-bedroom villa in St Tropez in July 1997. Talking about it, Sansum remembered how every day Diana would wake up at 7 am and chat to the bodyguard. He said, “She had been happy on that holiday." However, he added, "But I had seen her in tears too, when she learned of the murder of her friend, the fashion designer Gianni Versace. She confided in me her own fears that she might one day be assassinated. She asked if I thought his murder outside his home was a professional killing. I thought it was. Then she said something that always stayed with me — ‘Do you think they’ll do that to me?’ She was shaking and it was clear from her tone that she really thought that they might, whoever ‘they’ might be." "I spent some time reassuring her that no one was going to try to kill her and she was safe with us, but she definitely thought there was a risk that one day she might be assassinated," he said. 

Sansum narrated that Diana wanted to live with Dodi in the States. He said, “I actually signed up to join Diana and Dodi in America. She was definitely going, and that was that. She told me she was going there. She didn’t want to, but that was the only place she felt people weren’t having a go at her. It was probably her way of keeping sane, to get some respite.”

While the former security guard doesn’t think Diana was murdered. However, he reveals the presence of intelligence services following her just weeks before the crash might have been a factor. "We were generally followed by MI5 but this was the first time we had seen a Special Forces guy. We thought, ‘They’ve upped their game’." He added, "A witness driving a car traveling in front of the Mercedes in Paris on the night of the crash told the inquest that he saw a high-powered motorbike overtake the car just seconds before the crash. I believe that security officers following Diana, possibly British or a combined British–French team, may have either inadvertently caused the crash or were in close proximity to the car when it happened. If it was known that MI6 operatives were right by the Mercedes at the critical moment, a lot of people would have blamed them for it, and that would have been a huge scandal.”

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