Mohamed Al Fayed has died aged 94 – almost 26 years to the day of the crash that killed his son and Princess Diana.
The ex-Harrods owner and father of Dodi Al Fayed passed away on Wednesday after a long illness.
A Muslim funeral was held yesterday at the London Central Mosque in Regent’s Park, the tycoon’s son-in-law said. Ashfar Haider wrote on Facebook in Arabic: ‘Our Lord have mercy on him and forgive him, and open for him wide [the doors of] paradise.’
Mr Al Fayed went to his grave holding on to his obsession that his son and Princess Diana were murdered in a Paris road tunnel on August 31, 1997.
At Diana’s inquest in London, the bitter billionaire explosively accused Prince – now King – Charles of being ‘happy’ now that the Royal Family had ‘cleared the decks, they finished her, they murdered her’.
He spent more than a decade pedalling his bizarre and damaging conspiracy theories about the Royal Family’s alleged involvement in the car crash.
Mr Al Fayed was the world’s 1,493rd richest person, according to Forbes, worth an estimated $2 billion (£1.59 billion). He installed the Egyptian Room in his Knightsbridge store, which boasted several busts of himself, and he also created a memorial to Dodi and Diana, who were dating at the time of their deaths.
He is thought to have believed the couple were hours away from announcing their engagement.
Twenty years on from their deaths, friends said he continued to make the outlandish claim they were killed by security services.
His claims led to the Harrods store being stripped of its four royal warrants — the right to declare that a company supplies goods by appointment to the Royal Family.
In his latter years, even his extraordinary ramblings about the princess’s death were overshadowed by accusations against the tycoon himself.
A string of women came forward in 2017 to accuse him of sexual assault.
One alleged she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl when he grabbed her and ‘started rubbing himself on my chest’. Another was 17 when she said he coaxed her into a swimsuit and tried to kiss her.
