'No time' for princess baby test

Princess Diana was being pursued by paparazzi when she died

The doctor who oversaw the final battle to save Princess Diana has dismissed suggestions that medics should have carried out a pregnancy test.

Professor Bruno Riou said checking for signs of pregnancy would have amounted to a "disastrous loss of time".

He also told the inquest into Diana's death that her chances of survival after her car crash were "almost nil".

Mohamed Al Fayed, whose son Dodi also died in the crash, believes Diana was pregnant when she died.

He is convinced that Dodi was the father and that both the Princess and his son were killed in a conspiracy by MI6 to prevent the mother of the future king from having a Muslim child.

Pregnancy dismissed

But Prof Riou, from the anaesthetics and resuscitation department at Paris's Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, dismissed suggestions that staff who worked frantically to save the Princess in the early hours of 31 August 1997 noticed signs of pregnancy.

Giving evidence from Paris by video link, Prof Riou said that he knew of only four or five cases in medical literature where patients with similar levels of multiple injuries as Diana survived.

He told the inquest that two hours before she was declared dead, her chances were "almost nil".

Prof Riou was on duty just after 2am when Diana was brought in from the scene of her car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel.

During cross-examination from Michael Mansfield QC, representing Mr Al Fayed, Prof Riou agreed that an abdominal ultrasound test often carried out on patients with multiple injuries might be capable of picking up pregnancy.

And for a patient like her, bleeding massively and having been subject to cardiac arrest, I would have considered the fact of proceeding to an ultrasound (pregnancy) scan as a disastrous loss of time Prof Bruno Riou

But he told the court that he did not believe such a test was done that night because of the urgency for surgery to stop internal bleeding, the area of which had already been identified.

"The matter for me, when I receive someone suffering from multiple trauma, has got no meaning," he told the court in dismissing rumour of a pregnancy.

"As we had determined that the bleeding came from right inside the thorax, the issue was not relevant of what was going on the abdomen."

Pressed by Mr Mansfield on whether such a routine test could pick up a pregnancy at even four to five weeks, Prof Riou said even an experienced radiographer could spend half an hour looking for signs of pregnancy.

"And for a patient like her, bleeding massively and having been subject to cardiac arrest, I would have considered the fact of proceeding to an ultrasound scan as a disastrous loss of time," the professor said.