LONDON - Princess Diana's former lover, James Hewitt, got drunk in a Paris restaurant and re-enacted the high-speed car chase that ended in a devastating crash that killed the princess in August 1997.
Hewitt, a former army officer dubbed "the love rat" by Britain's tabloids, told a UK men's magazine thathe "decided to conduct a little test" after he had been out drinking and eating with four women at a Paris restaurant.
"I was having lunch with these four Venezuelan women who were all beautiful. And there's all these paparazzi waiting outside to get a picture of us together," he told GQ magazine in an interview due to be published on Thursday.
He said one of his lunch companions had a Mercedes car of the same model that Diana was travelling in when she was killed.
"So I got the girls into the Merc, jumped in the driver's seat and started bombing round the Peripherique (Paris ring road) until we got to the underpass where she died," he said.
Hewitt said he thought he was "about as drunk" as the driver of Diana's car had been when it crashed, killing Diana and her friend Dodi Al Fayed, the son of Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed.
Hewitt also told GQ he agreed with Fayed that the fatal crash was a "set-up".
"I don't care how drunk you are. There's no way you'd hit that pillar unless something happened to make you veer off the road. It was definitely a set-up," he said in the interview.
Diana was found in the mangled wreckage of her Mercedes after it sped into a Paris underpass, hit a concrete pillar and veered into the wall.
Despite an investigation into the crash which concluded that Henri Paul, the driver of the car, was drunk and was to blame for the accident, Fayed has repeatedly accused the British establishment of instituting a vast cover-up.
In a recent High Court libel case, the owner of the luxury department store accused Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, of masterminding the deaths.
Hewitt, now 41, first met Diana when he was 25 and she was 28. Britain's tabloids turned against him for profiting from the princess's memory by selling his story of their affair.
Last October Hewitt published his book "Love and War" and declared of Diana: "I still miss her".
