'Diana would have survived if French medics had not wasted time', says top surgeon

Professor Thomas Treasure, a leading British surgeon, said there was a "window of opportunity" to get her to hospital for a potentially life-saving operation when she was put in an ambulance 35 minutes after the accident.

But vital moments were allowed to "slip away" because medics opted to tend her in the stationary vehicle for another 40 minutes before deciding she was stable enough to leave.

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French doctors said that without their actions Diana would have been dead on arrival because she was so fragile.

But Professor Treasure said the Princess had been successfully stabilised soon after being put into the ambulance and could have been taken to hospital then.

Asked if he felt that they had squandered the time, he said: "It's a hard word, isn't it, but I think opportunities were lost.

"They had done a lot of good in that first half an hour but the next big amount of good that could have been done required a surgeon."

He questioned the decision of a French doctor in Diana's ambulance to order the driver to go slowly and then to stop for a full five minutes when it was just a few hundred yards from the hospital.

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The London inquest has heard that this was because he feared her pulse was about to stop for a second time and wanted to keep her stable.

But Professor Treasure said: "Whether, within a minute of the hospital, you would put your foot on the accelerator or on the brake is open to some debate." He also suggested that the surgeon who operated on Diana should have opened her chest from the front rather than the side, which might have allowed him to discover the source of her internal bleeding more quickly.

And he said the "extraordinary" amount of adrenaline Diana was given during the surgery might have been counterproductive.

The professor, a former president of the European Association for Cardio-thoracic Surgery, acknowledged that Diana had extremely serious injuries, but said: "When I pick through this with the benefit of hindsight [and ask] 'Was this recoverable?' the answer is 'Yes, it just about was'."

Earlier, the inquest heard that the princess was so traumatised as she lay in the wrecked Mercedes that she struggled with doctors and refused treatment.

Medics had to restrain, and eventually sedate, the princess as she thrashed about and tore off a drip inserted in her arm.

Professor Andre Lienhart, a French medic who wrote a report about how the Paris emergency services responded to the crash, said Diana was sitting sideways in the back seat when the car smashed into a pillar in the Pont de l'Alma Tunnel in Paris in the early hours of August 31, 1997.

The impact jolted her heart "very violently to the right", ripping a major blood vessel and causing huge internal bleeding.

Professor Lienhart said he later learned that nobody who had suffered similar injuries in the past had survived long enough to get to hospital.

He said the princess received the best and most appropriate treatment and, even with hindsight, he was certain that nothing should have been done differently.