Who's your daddy, Harry?
2005-06-29 10:51
London - Britain's royal family forced the late Princess Diana to blood test her younger son, Prince Harry, to prove he was not the offspring of an affair with an army officer, according to a newspaper report on Wednesday.
Diana, who died in 1997, did not tell Harry why his blood was being taken, the Sun newspaper said in extracts from a book by Simone Simmons, an "energy healer" billed as a former close friend and confidante of the princess.
Senior royals, notably Queen Elizabeth's husband Prince Philip, feared their son, Prince Charles, who was married to Diana, might not have been the real father of Harry, who was born in September 1984.
Diana had previously had a passionate affair with army officer Major James Hewitt, and there had been rumours that Harry — who, like Hewitt, has red hair — was the product of that relationship.
Being the bearer of unpleasant news
Simmons, whose book Diana: The Last Word, is being serialised by the tabloid newspaper, claimed she felt Diana should know about the rumours Harry was illegitimate.
"It fell to me to impart the unpleasant news to the princess," the paper quoted her as saying.
Diana, who publicly admitted to her affair with Hewitt in a 1995 television interview, insisted the dates of her affair with the officer meant he could not possibly be Harry's father, Simmons said.
However, she was pressured to carry out DNA tests on both Harry and his elder brother, Prince William, to prove their paternity, the Sun said in its Wednesday edition.
The tests showed both princes had been fathered by Charles, the heir to the British throne, who Diana finally divorced in 1996, a year before her death in a Paris car crash.
On Monday, the Sun printed an extract from the book in which Simmons claims Diana had a passionate affair with John F Kennedy Jr, the son of the assassinated United States president, who himself died in a plane crash in 1999.
Some other British newspapers have ridiculed Simmons' supposed revelations, saying she was never especially close to Diana and is most likely inventing stories for financial gain.