Cost of Diana inquest reaches £2.8m

Inquest officials confirmed that £2,885,618 has been spent on the central London hearing from July 1 2007 to February 29 this year.

The figure, met by the Ministry of Justice, comes on top of the reported £3.6 million cost of former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens' investigation, codenamed Operation Paget, into allegations of a conspiracy to murder the couple.

The latest inquest costs include a £207,697 staffing bill plus £1,328,195 spent on external legal services. Another £465,590 has been paid out on IT services while video conferencing and special visits cost £478,844.

Consultancy fees totalled £96,562 while running costs stand at £308,728 according to the figures published on the coroner's website. Inquest officials said the figures were being published in "the interests of openness".

The figures do not include the £187,464 incurred by the Coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker and the previous Coroner, Lady Butler-Sloss up to the 30 June 2007.

Lord Stevens launched Operation Paget in 2004 at the request of Michael Burgess, the Royal Coroner who was then overseeing the future Diana inquest.

His brief was specifically to investigate allegations that Diana and Dodi were murdered, the theory most commonly associated with Dodi's father, the Harrods tycoon Mohamed al Fayed. Lord Stevens rejected the murder claims but the 11-person inquest jury will be set to return their own verdict later.

They are to due back in court on March 31 to hear a summary of the case, before going out to consider their verdicts. They have sat through the evidence of more than 240 witnesses, both live and in statement form, since the inquests began in October.

The hearings finally got under way more than 10 years after Diana, Dodi and driver Henri Paul were killed in a Paris car crash on August 31 1997.