Controversial Diana documentary airs

Updated 23.50 Wed Jun 06 2007

Keywords: documentary, Diana

A controversial documentary about the crash which killed Diana, Princess of Wales has been aired despite pleas from her sons.

Prince William and Prince Harry told Channel 4 that plans to air Diana: The Witnesses in the Tunnel, which contains a photograph of their dying mother following the 1997 Paris crash, had left them "deeply distressed".

"It is their mother's last moments on earth and it's an invasion of her privacy. They are chipping away what little dignity there is in death" - Princes' private secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton

One showed Diana receiving oxygen from a French doctor as she lies dying, although her face is obscured. Others include the wrecked Mercedes and a view through the back of an ambulance in which the Princess was treated.

Their private secretary Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, who wrote to the broadcaster on Monday with the request, said the brothers were attempting to "protect their mother's memory".

He said in a televised interview on Tuesday night: "It is their mother's last moments on earth and it's an invasion of her privacy. They are chipping away what little dignity there is in death."

He added: "We are not objecting to the documentary, we are objecting just to these photographs."

He continued: "The photographs tell a story, the story could be equally well told by talking heads, the doctor (who treated Diana) himself describes the scene very, very vividly.

"There's no need to distress these two young men in a way that these pictures will."

In his letter to Hamish Mykura, the Channel 4 executive who commissioned the programme, Mr Lowther-Pinkerton asked: "If it were your or my mother dying in that tunnel, would we want the scene broadcast to the nation? Indeed, would the nation so want it?"

In a new twist, it has emerged that Mr Mykura's own father died in a car crash. He said he would not want images in which viewers could actually see his father dying to be broadcast but the Diana pictures are being shown in the public interest.

Julian Bellamy, head of Channel 4, said: "We have weighed the Princes' concerns against the legitimate public interest we believe there is in the subject of this documentary and in the still photography it includes."