LONDON, 1 September 2003 — British tycoon Mohamed Al-Fayed said yesterday he was determined to “discover the truth” behind the death of Princess Diana and his son Dodi, on the sixth anniversary of their death in a Paris car crash.

In a statement, Al-Fayed said he was “encouraged” by news that a British coroner would be opening an inquest into the lovers’ deaths, which he suspects might have been the result of foul play.

“As each year passes my determination to discover the truth about why this tragedy happened grows stronger,” said the Egyptian-born owner of Harrods department store and the Ritz hotel in Paris.

“I am supported by fair-minded people everywhere who know this was not an accident,” he said.

“And I am encouraged by signs that we may, at last, be having an inquest into the tragedy and, hopefully, the public inquiry which I have sought for so long,” he added.

Local officials in Surrey, the southeast English county where Dodi Fayed lived, said Friday that its coroner Michael Burgess would be conducting an inquiry, though they gave no date for its start.

By coincidence, Burgess is also the coroner to the British royal family including Prince Charles, the heir apparent to Queen Elizabeth II to whom Diana was married from 1981 until their divorce in 1996.

The inquest will be the first in Britain into the Aug. 31, 1997 crash in an underpass in the French capital.

In September 1999 a French judicial inquiry pinned most of the blame on Henri Paul, a Ritz Hotel chauffeur who was found to have been driving too fast and under the influence of alcohol.

Paul was also killed in the accident, while bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, the lone survivor, has said he remembers little of what happened. Under a 1983 law, inquests need to be conducted whenever a body is returned to Britain following a death abroad.