Diana Was Unconscious, Moaning at Crash Scene

PARIS (Reuter) - "She was unconscious...moaning and gesturing in every direction," said a French doctor who was the first person to treat Princess Diana at the scene of her fatal car crash early Sunday.

Doctor Frederic Mailliez told France-2 television Monday he happened to drive by only minutes after the accident took place in a road tunnel in central Paris.

"I stopped my car and went to see. There were many people around and lots of panic," said Maillez, in his late 30s, who was off duty at the time.

"I saw that two people were dead and two were seriously hurt. I went back to my car to call emergency services and give them a first medical assessment before returning to the site with some of my equipment," Maillez said.

When he returned to the car, a man who turned out to be a volunteer fireman had started giving first aid to the front seat passenger, bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, the only of the four people in the car who survived the crash.

"I therefore went to the aid of the young woman in the back who turned out to be Lady Diana. I did not recognize her immediately," Maillez said.

"I helped to free her upper respiratory tracts," said Maillez, who described how Diana's head lay on her own shoulder, "in a position in which you cannot breathe if you are unconscious."

"I therefore lifted her head and helped her breathe with an oxygen mask," Maillez said.

Diana died in a hospital more than three hours after the accident. Her friend, Dodi Al Fayed, was killed. Rees-Jones is seriously ill but doctors say his life is not in danger.

Maillez said there were many photographers at the scene. "About 10 or 15 of them, and they were snapping away at the car non-stop though one cannot say they hampered me or my work."

"They were just like the people you find milling around the site of serious accidents," he said.

Police are holding seven photographers in connection with the crash which occurred while Diana's car was driving at high speed with newsmen on motorcycles riding behind in hot pursuit.

French media have said police are looking for other photographers who left the site before they arrived, presumably to develop photos of the accident which have been offered to publications for huge amounts.