Wales died was working for the French secret service, the British team reinvestigating her death has been told. The inquiry - headed by Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner - into the Paris car crash that killed Diana is now trying to obtain the chauffeur's files from French intelligence but is being delayed by the reluctance of the authorities to hand them over. Stevens's team has asked the country's domestic intelligence service, the DST, to surrender all its "agent handling" files on Henri Paul, the chauffeur, to establish whether he was doing any work for his French intelligence bosses on the night of the crash.

Paul crashed the car, killing himself, Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed in a tunnel in central Paris in 1997. It has previously been claimed - and strenuously denied - that he worked for SIS, the secret intelligence service, also known as MI6. Well-placed sources say requests by the Stevens team for information about Paul's activities on the day of the crash, and demands for complete records of tests taken on his blood after he died, have become bogged down by the "incredible bureaucracy" of the French justice system.

*****

The role of Paul, who was deputy head of security at the Paris Ritz hotel, and what he was doing in the hours up to the crash are central to the inquiry. Mohamed al-Fayed, the Harrods tycoon and Dodi’s father who also owns the Paris Ritz, has claimed Diana and his son were murdered by British intelligence. Scotland Yard sources disclosed last week that the French government had finally confirmed Paul's employment by the DST during discussions last year. A Yard source said: "We now know he was working for the French secret service and the French have got to give us access to the records of what he was doing. It's an issue. We want to know where he was and what he was doing that evening." After Paul's death French police discovered he controlled secret accounts containing more than £100,000 in 14 banks across France.